Cops dress up to catch muggers

Jen Lawson

Friday, July 11, 2003 | 11:11 a.m.

A group of Metro robbery detectives has been donning costumes and makeup lately. They're not appearing in a show on the Strip -- they're posing as elderly and homeless citizens walking alone at night as a new way to make a dent in street muggings.

Forty-five percent of robberies in Las Vegas are street robberies, but the solve rate for these crimes is low, Lt. Ted Snodgrass, head of Metro's robbery unit, said.

They began looking at ways to address the problem last year, and rolled out the decoy program in October. About 20 would-be muggers have been arrested, including eight in the past two weeks.

Snodgrass stopped short of calling the program a success just yet, but he hopes that if the potential robbers know that the woman walking alone or the man in tattered clothing is a cop, they'll think twice about committing the robbery.

"We want people to wonder," Snodgrass said.

Snodgrass played a short training video that shows Metro officers carrying out the decoy operation. A plainclothes female officer is walking down a street at night with a purse over her shoulder and an officer posing as the robber jumps out of the shadows, grabs her purse, pushes her down and runs.

Uniformed officers in an unmarked police car, who had been watching from a nearby hiding place, pull up, surround him and take him into custody.

"The goal is to get the robber without anybody getting hurt," Snodgrass said. "They're not prepared for it. They're almost shocked."

The operations have been carried out all over the city. Around Christmas, they conducted them inside shopping malls.

Capt. Tom Lozich, commander of Metro's robbery/homicide unit, stole the idea of using decoys from police in San Francisco. A 1993 book, Surviving the Age of Fear by former San Francisco cop William Langlois, served as their guide on how to carry out the decoy operation.

Before launching the operation, robbery detectives and supervisors met with representatives from the district attorney's office, who taught them about entrapment to ensure that they don't bait the robbers.

"We got their advice on what it takes to make these cases fly," Lozich said. "(The would-be robbers) have to make the decision to commit the crime."

It took some experimentation before the decoy operation started to work. Some of the officers, even while in costume and in makeup, still didn't look vulnerable enough. The decoys also have to be theatrically inclined, Snodgrass said.

Would-be robbers are very discriminating, he said, and tend to study their potential victim closely. In one instance, Snodgrass said, "a guy walked up to the decoy and checked the decoy's socks, but they weren't dirty," so the would-be mugger left him alone.

The next night, the same decoy -- wearing dirty socks this time -- was mugged by the same robber.

"We're putting the decoy into harm's way. At any time, this person could be stabbed or shot," Snodgrass said. "The people who do these (decoy operations) are heroes."