Friday, June 1, 2007 | 6:51 a.m.
.
It's a simple scene: Metro Officer Bill Cassell is writing a citation to somebody he saw committing a nuisance crime, jaywalking or littering or something along those lines.
"Last name?" Cassell says.
The man responds: "You."
(Cassell remembers scrawling Y-E-W across the ticket.)
"First name?" Cassell asks.
The man responds with the four-letter word that completes the phrase.
With this, Cassell sweeps his suspect off to jail, where he is booked under a friendlier, more familiar name: John Doe.
Metro Police regularly encounter - and arrest - Las Vegas' anonymous. Men and women who, for myriad reasons, don't or won't give up their names and thus get arrested under the American generic: John or Jane Doe.
As of Sunday, 141 Does were arrested in May in Clark County; 126 Johns and 15 Janes. The crimes with which they're charged often reveal something of their identities, or give a glimpse into why they were booked anonymously.
Here's a hint: Hiding your identity from police often means you have something else to hide, Cassell says, like an outstanding warrant or a parole officer who won't be happy when he finds out you're wearing handcuffs.
Many of May's John Does were arrested on suspicion of serious traffic violations or crimes connected to drugs: possession, sales, trafficking. Most of the Janes were arrested on suspicion of soliciting prostitution. These are the sort of crimes commonly committed by repeat offenders, people who could get in even more trouble if they're caught at their old offenses.
So it's little surprise that many Doe arrests include additional charges for providing police with false information, possessing fake IDs or failing to carry identification .
"The people that have a reason to conceal their IDs are generally wanted people," Cassell said. "Or people who have an extensive criminal past."
Although that's not always the case.
Police also encounter people who are too disoriented to identify themselves or who don't have identification because of homelessness or illegal immigration. (These Does likely account for the nuisance crimes : sleeping in cars, jaywalking, disturbing the peace.) Sometimes the Does are mentally ill and afraid giving up a name will mean being sent to a hospital they don't want to visit. (Perhaps this is behind a more unusual Jane Doe arrest logged this month: "unlawful act related to human excrement." A charge issued only in jail.)
For every breed of anonymous arrestee, police protocol is the same: a routine investigation that is part officer instinct and part fingerprint identification.
If a police officer suspects someone is concealing his identity, or doesn't have any identification to prove he is who he claims, the officer will ask a series of questions designed to get at the truth.
Questions that Cassell won't disclose, citing security reasons.
"We do not take the decision to book someone as a John or Jane Doe lightly," Cassell said. "It has to go past a hunch."
It's jail officials who are ultimately tasked with figuring out just who the Does really are.
Through routine processing, most are identified within 48 hours, Metro Lt. Richard Forbus said.
The process starts at the detention center with a search of the Doe's person and personal property. During these searches, it's not uncommon for corrections officers to find ID cards hidden in shoes, socks, underwear and other locations, Forbus said.
The Does are also fingerprinted on arrival, and their prints are checked against a bank of prints belonging to people who have been arrested locally.
If the Doe has been arrested in Clark County before - and most have, Forbus said - the match will come up almost instantly.
Police have used the local fingerprint bank for almost four years. In that time, they've seen John and Jane Does dwindle from upward of 30 a day to fewer than half that number, Forbus said.
Technology has helped, but it's not everything.
If the local fingerprint search doesn't yield results, the anonymous prints are sent to the FBI, where they're run through a federal fingerprint bank - a time-consuming search.
In the meantime, correctional officers search the Doe a second time. They'll also run them through a 12-question interview, called the "Doe check list" and designed to wriggle some scrap of information from the arrestee: former addresses, criminal background, aliases. The Doe's answers are also sent to the FBI for investigation.
Until the person can be identified, they'll wait.
And if identification is utterly impossible, a fake name will have to work, Forbus said.
"If they really can't find anything, they just have to stick with what they have," he said. "Ultimately, people have to have some identity."
archive
