South Florida Criminal Attorneys Blog
Dressed in a green shirt, blue pants, and white sneakers Raymond Young walked into a Great Neck, NY Chase bank branch on Middle Neck Road at 9:30 in the morning brandishing a handgun and “verbally demanded money from a teller,” police said. His trendy ensemble was topped off with a light-colored baseball cap.
What Mr. Young didn’t anticipate when he chose to rob that particular bank was that a Lake Success police officer would happen to be in the bank and witness the entire armed robbery. So when Young fled the bank with an undisclosed amount of cash, he already had the deck stacked against his possibility of escape.
Equipped with eye-witness identification by the officer, the Kings Point police were able to look back at surveillance video that was taken at the time of the holdup as well as having still photos including a direct shot of the perpetrator. They also performed a license plate “read” on the suspected vehicle using special equipment (Automatic number plate recognition, ALPR), which identified the suspect. The information was then released by the Kings Point department to the Nassau County Police and all other local area police agencies along with all photos and details of the heist.
Just after 7 p.m. the surveillance equipment alerted police that the suspect vehicle had entered the village, according to Kings Point Department Commissioner Jack Miller.
Coincidentally, it was a Lake Success police officer that made the actual arrest. Police Sgt. Thomas Alter told the Great Neck Record that the information relayed from the Kings Point Police Department as well as the visual sighting by their own officer was responsible for Mr. Young’s apprehension. His car was noticed by a Lake Success police officer, displaying the identified license plate, at the intersection of the Northern State Parkway and Lakeville Road where he quickly pulled over the alleged thief, arrested him, and took him into custody.
70-year old Raymond Young, from Memphis, Tennessee, was charged with first-degree criminal use of a firearm, and robbery, first-degree. The elderly man was arraigned in First District Court in Hempstead by Judge Eric Bjorneby who ordered him held without bail.
Commissioner Miller crowed to the Great Neck Record, a local newspaper, that Young’s arrest was greatly aided by his department, citing that they have a total of 19 cameras positioned in tactical areas throughout the village as well as at all entrances to the Long Island North Shore town. Kings Point is located on the Great Neck Peninsula in the Town of North Hempstead in Nassau County.
He pointed out that there are 19 cameras of this type in the village, such as the main camera on East Shore Road at the site of the Jewish Center (Chabad), and the one also on East Shore Road near the entrance to the village. He stressed that only a select group of Kings Point officers have total access to these camera in real time, but the department has the ability to always check the recorded videos and view any individuals that have come into or exited the community at any time during the course of each day.
Miller also said that the Village has plans to expand their surveillance system in due course to include a total of 44 license-plate readers at nineteen intersections within the confines of the Village which is a little more than three square miles in size. The proposal received worries from civil liberties activists in addition to local residents who were concerned about the cost of the elaborate system. However, this past June, a $1,140,000 bond offering was approved by the village for the expansion of the system.