- Imagine a hypothetical situation where a team of vicious
thieves plots an exceptionally violent bank robbery in the downtown financial
district of a major city. Numerous anomalies are noticed during the commission
of this crime.
The bank tellers are not able to send out an alarm to the police even though
banks have numerous hidden silent alarms for foiling robbery.
The police take an extraordinarily long amount of time to show up on the
scene, despite an unblemished record of fast response to prior robberies.
The cops who do eventually respond are not dispatched from the nearest
police station, but from a suburban police force many miles away that travels
far below emergency speeds to intercept the robbers.
The criminals are business partners of the chief of police and the Mayor.
The Mayor's youngest brother is a director of the company providing security
to the bank, and the City's comptroller (in charge of the money) came from
a company in charge of remotely accessing the bank's electronics (which
could explain the lack of transmission of an alarm at the start of the
robbery).
The City Council passes new laws immediately after the robbery to crack
down on the financial freedoms of the town's citizens, using the pretext
that the police had an "intelligence failure" caused by inadequate
budgets and inability of different departments to properly communicate
with each other.
The newspapers report that nearby towns warned the police that the robbery
was about to happen, but never collect all of these warnings into one report
to show the overwhelming evidence that the City's elite deliberately allowed
the robbers to act unhindered.
Despite these prior warnings, the police act surprised when notified it
was underway. The commander of the nearest police station continues working
at his desk despite the robbery across the street. The Mayor is holding
a photo opportunity at a nearby elementary school, and continues reading
to second graders even after his assistant whispers in his ear that bank
robbers had just committed the largest mass murder in the city's history.
The region's liberal, "alternative" newspaper that had previously
published accurate reports about the Mayor's corruption scandals attacks
independent journalists who dare to describe these anomalies.
The police forces of the city and nearby cities were following the robbers
before their assault on the bank, and the identity of the robbers (as declared
by police spokespersons after the fact) is disputed by press accounts that
several of the robbers have good alibis for being in other cities at the
time.
Finally, long after the fact, information surfaces that the police were
conducting practice exercises simulating official response to bank robbers.
Some of the responding officers were away at this "war game"
at the police training academy and therefore were unable to apprehend the
perpetrators. The honest cops who were in the station were confused by
other drills simulating robberies at the other banks in the city, drills
that were scheduled by the top political and police leadership of the city
at the same time as the real robberies, which made it difficult for the
honest cops to determine which bank to protect until after the crimes were
completed.
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