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Retail videos are garbage 99% of the time. You aren't going to get reliable or useable prints from the scene of a retail store. Even if you did, you have to have a match in AFIS for them to be useful. Even if you do, congrats, you know the guy exists, his name, and social. Now you just have to find him before he robs someone else at gunpoint, and/or ends up killing someone. Every non-tiny police department has a pursuit policy. It tends to be some form of one of the following: 1. Only pursue if the danger of the pursuit is less than the danger of this guy to society. Consider the crime, how easily we can find this guy, current traffic conditions, weather, etc. Guy robber a liquor store and is going 100mph on a well lit, perfectly straight 5 lane highway at 1am on a Wednesday with no other traffic? Get em. Same guy is going 100mph through a residential as the school busses are about to drop off kids? Terminate pursuit. Sadly, it is never that cut and dry 2. Don't pursue unless it was a murder/attempted murder, and the conditions are safe for it. 3. Don't pursue. #3 Works amazing for about 5 years. Somewhere 5-10 years later, the local gangs and career criminals learn that if they just drive fast enough to endanger lives, the cops will leave them alone. State police departments, which usually spend more time on highways, tend to have a policy closer to #1. Because of this, they will often assist local agencies that have a policy of #2 or #3, when they are doing stuff that they expect a vehicle pursuit may ensue. Someone usually brings up "Oh, well if you have the license plate why not just arrest them later." Because it doesn't work that way. You see a masked guy rob a store, jump in a car, and peel out of there at 1am, and don't pursue? If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway, knock on the door, registered owner can answer, and will tell you that a lot of people have keys to his car, he doesn't know anything, he was home asleep. And theres not a thing you can do about it. The only way you can prove it was him was if you saw the driver and are 100% sure its that guy, or you convince him to talk himself into getting caught in a lie, or give up his cellphone, or some other dumb decision. |
More likely, the car was stolen.