BanditTracker: Have You Seen This Bank Robber?
March 26, 2010— -- The "Scarecrow Bandits," so named for their plaid shirts and floppy straw hats, were a crafty crew.
The seven-man group pulled off 21 bank robberies across North Texas in the span of about a year, according to the FBI. For a time, there was a $90,000 bounty over their heads, among the highest rewards for crimes of that kind.
The elusive robbers were finally caught in June 2008. How? With help from a public tip prompted by one crime-busting Web site.
Launched in 2007, BanditTracker.com displays images of armed robbers pulled from security cameras, as well as descriptions of the suspects. The site lets law enforcement officers across a given region pool information and then easily share it with the public.
The original site was designed for Texas by the FBI, the North Texas Crime Commission and Electronic Tracking Systems (ETS), a Carrollton, Texas-based location and tracking security organization. Since then, similar sites have spread to Chicago and St. Louis and for states like Arkansas and Indiana.
BanditTracker Northeast, for the New York and New Jersey area, launched this week.
"It has been a phenomenal tool for us," Special Agent John Wetherington, the Dallas FBI's bank robbery coordinator, said at a law enforcement event about the service. "The Dallas team has seen a great, great response from this Web site."
While the FBI posts similar information on its Web site, it's often posted in an ad hoc and incomplete manner, said Jim Margolin, an agent and spokesman for the FBI in New York.
BanditTracker makes it easy for officers from all levels of law enforcement to immediately share information with each other and members of the public who might be able to spot suspects in their neighborhoods and local businesses, he said.
Margolin also said that while officers are assigned to geographic regions, robbers often commit crimes across several different areas.
"Robbers don't necessarily adhere to those boundaries, so it made sense to combine information from all four [FBI field offices]," he said.
