Recently, we caught a pedestrian robbery suspect about an hour after the crime, but by now the (homeless) victim was nowhere to be found. I figured I might get a confession if he thought he had been identified. We stood him up outside the unit and had another car pull up with high beams and takedown lights on him so he couldn’t tell the backseat was empty. The officer then gave a “thumbs up” out the window and said over the radio, “Positive ID.”
All this amounts to is a bluff to get a confession — if an offender thinks you have plenty of evidence against them, they are more likely to confess or at least give some kind of admission.
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