Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
Garry Dale has gnawed his fingernails to knobs. For weeks now, he has spent hours holed up in a car watching Metro cops get robbed; sometimes at gunpoint, sometimes several times a day, always apparently unarmed.
It's a wrenching, racking wait, says Dale, a sergeant in Metro's new robbery task force. It's a tedious, troubling thing to bear from behind tinted windows, but it works. Metro officers have been dressing as decoys and loitering to lure street robbers since early November, when the task force was formed. Lately, it seems like word's getting out: Cops in disguise are praying for robbers to pounce.
"The decoy merely presents robbers with a plausible alternate victim, one they would be picking on if we're not there," Dale says, poised with binoculars behind the wheel of an unmarked car. "We used to get two or three a night, now we really have to work for them."
The number of street-level robberies is down around 10 percent from early November, Lt. Ted Snodgrass says. Still, the overall number of robberies is up 27 percent from this time last year - an upward trend the robbery section lieutenant says started last December.
"We've noticed there are young males roaming around like predator groups," Snodgrass says. "To try to keep the predators from the prey, that's the ultimate thing here."
When Dale's officers prepare to send a decoy out, it's meticulous. They commence in a conference room before a white board and draw out an aerial schematic of where they'll work. Key spots are identified: the bodega, the empty dirt lot, the supermarket, the nearest hospital - just in case.
The decoy, the plausible alternative, sits with arms folded, listening to fellow officers establish their surveillance line of sight. Alone in the field, the decoy must be convincing: He burps for authenticity and talks through rotted teeth. Security concerns, however, prevent the decoy from being further described. Without an obvious weapon, the decoy is a professional sitting duck.
This is why Dale assaults his nails. "I hate having somebody out like that," he says.
The decoy was once robbed within seven seconds of hitting the street - it's a department record. "It starts to infuriate you after a while," Dale says.
Once someone drove up to the decoy and attempted to force him into his car. Usually, the decoy's just bullied, pushed around by a nervous robber working up his courage. It starts with the robber asking for something; usually, a cigarette. Then it turns into demanding something, demanding a cigarette. Then the robber tells the decoy he better watch out, that the decoy might get his money taken, standing outside like that. The robbers poke and provoke, they gauge the decoy's reaction, then reach for the decoy's cash.
Undercover officers who hear every second from nearby hideouts say the lead-up to a decoy robbery is almost always some variation of this dialogue; it's so predictable that they start to get jumpy when someone approaches the decoy with a question. If everything goes according to plan, the robber will try to break away as cops in unmarked cars descend out of nowhere from every angle. Quickly, an anonymous van will appear and three cops wearing hunter green fatigues will jump out. If needed, they'll give chase, said Chris Hubbard, an officer assigned to work the arrest van Wednesday.
"Juveniles tend to run, they get that adrenaline rush," Hubbard says, sitting in the back of the van next to riot shields and a box of rubber gloves. He, like all the officers in Dale's unit, has a gun strapped to his thigh. During debriefing, Dale's officers snap their identical quick-draw holster guards back and forth, the plastic pieces shifting together like a group of clicking crickets.
"A true criminal doesn't get the adrenaline," Hubbard says. "They're not going to get that fight or flight."
Most robbers the task force encounters already have extensive rap sheets, Dale says. It takes a certain sort of person to rob, police say. They're typically men aged 15 to 25 for whom the polite barrier between strangers is broken. It takes someone who's willing to approach a person utterly unknown to them and demand money with force. An experienced robber, someone who's no longer nervous over the perverse intimacy of face-to-face theft, will snatch a wallet and calmly walk away.
"It's a very small segment of the population that's willing to go the distance they're willing to go," Dale says. "It's the most violent section of the population. They'll walk over our bodies to get away."
This is why most police officers don't make good decoys. They're just not good at letting themselves be roughed up Dale says. He leans into a reporter to make the point. "You don't like me here," he says, hovering inches from a throat - a proximity he says robbers demand of their victims. "You don't like that."
The decoy doesn't have to like it, but he has to want it, take it and give nothing back. Contrary to all his police training, a decoy must back down in the face of threat and trust other officers to handle it. The decoy works in short shifts.
"We have to bring him in to relax," Dale says.
Sitting in an unmarked car early Wednesday afternoon, watching his decoy officer walk the corner of Lake Mead and Jones boulevards, Dale gets three electronic pages in the space of a few hours - they're to inform him of robberies No. 16, 17 and 18 since around 10:30 p.m. the previous day. Dale is paged every time a robbery occurs in Las Vegas.
And Las Vegas is part of the problem, Snodgrass says.
"When you're taking about Vegas, it's a completely different animal," he says. "How many places do you have in the country that are open 24/7? To some extent, we call it Eldorado - the streets are paved in gold. There is a lot of money in this town. There are a lot of targets. For lack of a better term, there's a lot of prey coming to this city."
Robbers have recently figured out that decoys are working at night, and so they're becoming less brazen after dark, Dale says. In response, the robbery task force has started doing daylight stings. Looking through his binoculars at a nearby convenience store, Dale eyeballs a young man sitting on crates in an alleyway, drinking a soda and watching a nearby parking lot. This is the sort of activity that typically puts task force officers on guard. "People that are hanging out but not really doing anything," Dale says. "People that don't belong."
Still, Dale determines the young man isn't a threat. "You know how you can tell?" he says. "Sugar free and caffeine free." No robber would waste their time with a drink like that - why diet when you've got nothing to lose? The man eventually shuffles away, a magazine under his arm.
Later in the evening, it's not so simple. The decoy, standing outside a gas station, is approached by a couple - a man and a woman walking out of the gas station with beer. The woman can be overheard approaching the decoy and warning him that he should go home, that his money is in plain sight, that he might be robbed. Then the man leans in inches from the decoys face and says, "You're a cop. I ought to (expletive) you up." Then his fighting words are too muffled to make out.
Dale drives screaming out of his hiding place. He's furious that the decoy was identified, furious that the decoy was threatened. By the time he arrives on the scene, a handful of undercover cars are already parked nearby, and the couple are separated for questioning. The man has a knife and crack pipe in his pocket; the woman has what appears to be an illicit substance, a dingy powder, laid out across the dash of her car.
The decoy has faded into some black background to watch, unseen from afar, the fruits of his labor. The man insists that he was cursing at his female companion, who he says he met at a bar down the road. "I was talking to her," he insists, his hands bound behind his back. "We talk to each other like that, we're friends." The man has a handful of prior robbery charges from another state. An officer asks him what he's doing in Las Vegas.
The man is quick to respond, straight-faced: "I came to start a new life."
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