The NYPD was caught slippin’.
Altoona-ing In
Although cops used all manner of technological means to try to apprehend the killer of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, it was a keen-eyed McDonald’s worker — not facial recognition or other high-tech surveillance tools — who ultimately led to his arrest.
As the New York Times reports, police were hesitant to attribute the dramatic end to their five-day, multi-state manhunt for the killer to any one thing, after deploying drones, artificial intelligence, K-9 units, and even scuba divers to bring him in.
After police in Pennsylvania arrested a suspect named Luigi Mangione, officials with the New York Police Department were nevertheless forced to admit that the now-notorious photo of the 26-year-old smiling in his Manhattan hostel did him in after a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant in the tiny PA town of Altoona alerted police when a customer recognized him.
As NYPD chief of detectives Joseph Kenny told the NYT, “it would be the release of that photograph to the media” that led to Mangione’s apprehension.
Notably, that old-fashioned form of “facial recognition” netted far better results than anything the NYPD was able to drum up — and in post-9/11 New York City, police surveillance capabilities are vast.
“For just over five days, our [New York Police Department] investigators combed through thousands of hours of video, followed up on hundreds of tips and processed every bit of forensic evidence — DNA, fingerprints, IP addresses and so much more — to tighten the net,” New York Police Department commissioner Jessica Tisch told CNN earlier in the week.
Officers also went door-to-door “interviewing potential witnesses and doing the good old-fashioned police work that our investigators are famous for,” she continued — all, it seems, for naught.
Detective Stories
For all that high-tech sleuthing, police in a town known for its bizarre take on pizza ended up arresting Mangione after he essentially fell into their laps. As experts who spoke to the NYT pointed out, however, the circumstances surrounding this case — and that photo — were unique.
“That photo has been seen more times than in your average homicide,” remarked Sean Patrick Griffin, a former Philadelphia police officer who now teaches criminal justice at South Carolina’s Citadel military college.
Mangione’s striking appearance — “not just dark, but prominent eyebrows,” in Griffin’s analysis — likely made him easier to spot, the report notes.
In fact, as ex-CIA officer and author Robert Baer told the newspaper, he was surprised it took five days for police to capture the well-heeled suspect.
“Once they had that guy’s picture, when he pulls his mask down, it was a given he would be arrested,” Baer said.
It’s too soon to know why the NYPD was unable to apprehend Mangione when he was still within city limits, but we can say pretty definitively that whatever went into their secret sauce didn’t work.
More on the UHC shooter: The Arrested CEO Killing Suspect Might Have the Wildest Goodreads Account We’ve Ever Seen