Rosenstein said that many try to shield their identities with glasses or hats. "One of the challenges they face is that they want to get to the teller quickly and get the money before anyone calls the police," he said, "so they can't very well walk in the front door with a mask on and tip everyone off that it is a robbery."
If there is a profile of the typical bank robber in Maryland, at least in terms of methodology, Fletcher Dorsett of Salisbury is it. The 40-year-old walked into a Bank of America branch on Bay Ridge Drive in Annapolis about 2:30 the afternoon of May 21, 2007, and handed a teller a note that has almost as many grammar violations as words: "I have a gun will shot give me all hundreds now."
It was a warm spring day, the temperature around 70, but the picture on bankbandits.org (with "captured" written in red across his face) shows Dorsett wearing a knit winter cap and an oversize coat more appropriate for the first frost. He made no effort to hide his face and didn't show a gun. The teller gave him $3,295. A relative saw his picture on the TV news and turned him in to police. He pleaded guilty in February and was sent to prison for eight years.
Supervisory Special Agent Patrick S. Dugan, who oversees the bank robbery squad for the Baltimore field office of the FBI, said the Web site has helped investigators see trends and link multiple robberies to one person, though he couldn't say how many arrests have been made directly through the picture gallery. Cisar told a seminar this year that agents did link one suspect to several robberies upon seeing his picture on the screen.
If anything, the Web site shows the variety of people who rob banks.
"We have true hard-core bad guys who are using guns and have switch cars and who are sometimes talking on walkie-talkies or cell phones to people outside," Dugan said. "Then we have some of our hard-core criminals who aren't carrying guns into banks because they know that if for the next 30 seconds of their life they don't have a gun in their hand, they can't get charged with being a felon in possession of a handgun.
"Then, in others, we see crimes of desperation, drug addicts and substance abusers, who are looking for whatever they can [get] in a real quick score."
This year, Baltimore City and Baltimore County have each reported 33 bank holdups. The city is on pace for fewer than the 54 in 2008, but the county is on the verge of surpassing its total last year of 34. Guns are displayed in just 25 percent of the robberies, the FBI says. Notes implying a gun are used in about half, and the rest, Dugan said, "are less violent than that."
The numbers are nothing when compared with 1997, when Baltimore City and county each had more than 130 bank robberies. But don't worry: Even with the recent drop, the Baltimore region is tracking evenly with other places around the country. We're No. 2 in per-capita homicides, and we still remain in the top 10 for per-capita bank robberies.
