I passed the OP along to a police officer, here’s his response:
The answer is that it is not a simple answer but here goes…
In the scenario you provided, I would contact the victim and ask for a description of the house and the suspect. I would then have him point out the house to me. If its a case where there is a party with 30 guests, I would take the “victim” with me to see if he could point out the “suspect”. If its a misdemeanor, I would only do this if the victim wanted to do this and if he wanted to press charges. If its a felony, I would try to talk the victim into doing it and we will arrest on most felonies whether the victim wants to press charges or not. At that point, if the victim and I go to the location and the victim points out the suspect, I would contact the suspect and get a statement, issue a cite or make an arrest depending on the circumstances.
It should be noted that if the crime is serious and just occurred, I can enter a home without warrant under the “fresh pursuit” doctrine. If some time has passed or it is a minor crime, I may need a warrant to enter. Or if I know the suspect’s identity I can list him as a suspect in the crime report and either a warrant will be issued for his arrest later or he will be given a date to go to court. So much depends on the type of crime: “He slapped me” vs. “He just shot my brother in the face” and everywhere in between.
If it is just a single occupant or just a few people in the home, I would probably knock on the door (as long as its a standard crime and not an attempted murder or something to that degree) and try to detain the person who matched the suspect description without the victim being present. Once the situation appeared safe and the suspect was detained, I would have a partner read the victim the “witness admonition statement” then do what is called a “field show-up”.
The witness admonition statement tells the victim that just because the police are detaining someone it does not mean they commited the crime. The victim is under no obligation to identify anyone and if the person the police are detaining is not the suspect then the police will continue looking for the suspect. This only needs to be read when a suspect is being detained by police and it usually only occurs right after the crime occurs and police are in “fresh pursuit” of the suspect. It did not have to be done in the earlier scenario because when the victim goes with the officer to point someone out, there are no suspects being detained by police at that time.
If the victim identifies the person I’m detaining as the suspect, I can take the suspect’s statement, issue a citation or make an arrest just like the previous example.
The Line-ups or Six-packs (also known as “photo line-ups”) are usually not used right after the crime occurred so it is rarely done by patrol officers. It is usually done at a later date by detectives. Physical line-ups that you see in the movies are rarely ever used at my department (or any that I know of) but photo six-packs are done all the time. They serve the same purpose. A six-pack is when you believe you identified the suspect but the victim has not identified the suspect yet. The detective takes a photo of the suspect than finds five similar photos and puts them together. The detective then goes to the victim and asks the victim to identify the suspect. This is done because it would be considered leading the victim if the detective only took the one photograph to the victim and said, “Is this the guy who did it?”
An example of the photo line-up being used would be if in your above scenario the victim pointed out the house but when police arrived nobody was home so the victim could not identify anyone. The officer would leave and write a crime report for the detectives to follow-up on. A week later, detectives find out that four people live in the house and based on the victim’s suspect description, they feel one of the four residents is the suspect because he matches the description. They obtain the suspect’s photo then do the six-pack and go to the victim. If the victim chooses the suspect photo, then detectives have a legit suspect. If the victim says he does not recognize any of them or if he chooses one of the random photos, then detectives may rule out their “suspect” as not being the suspect afterall. Maybe they will go on to question the residents about guests they had over that night.
Hope all this info helped!
On preview, this pretty much matches what Loach said as well.
