You’ve seen it a hundred times on TV : bad guy robs a bank or takes hostages for some purpose or another. Barricades himself. Tense negotiations fail, and only one option remains : sending in the cow-boys. They cut the power, throw lots of flashbang and smoke grenades, rush in guns blazing. When the smoke clears, the bad guy is nowhere to be found. SWAT hastedly sweeps the building, only to find one of their own tied up and naked in a closet : the bad guy has fled in a SWAT uniform during the chaos.
The question is : has this ever happened in real life ? Where does the cliché come from ?
Don’t know about dressing up as a SWAT officer, but during the Iranian Embassy siege in London one of the terrorists hid amongst the hostages and was taken outside. He was caught during the debriefing when one of the hostages recognised him.He was the only one to survive.
It takes a bunch of time to subdue somebody & remove their clothes. The victim pretty much needs to be unconscious, since they’re not likely to cooperate. Rendering people instantly unconscious is not easy.
Folks in assault teams try real hard to not get separated from their group. And teams keep count of themselves, always on guard to prevent losing a straggler.
Even if a bad guy magically swapped clothes with a team member, him wandering away from the action would sure look funny to all the other cops & TV cameras stationed outside.
In short, pure Hollywood BS. And I’m no expert on cop shows, but I’ve never heard of this as a plot device. Sneaking out while the assault team gets ready so they assault an empty building, sure. But the bad guy hiding amongst the assault team, never seen it.
One of the things I liked about the Spike Lee film Inside Man was the plan the bank robbers used for escape - stay covered head to toe so they would be unidentifiable by the patrons of the bank, and then ditch the disguises and leave with the crowd. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s fool-proof, but it struck me as having a pretty good chance of working.
The aforementioned Leon (a.k.a. The Professional) and Mission: Impossible include scenes like this, though the latter is more complex. Eraser includes a scene of people disguising themselves as EMTs to get into a building.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but a few months ago, a guy robbed a bank in Seattle wearing a yellow safety vest, blue shirt, respirator mask and safety goggles. He got away via an inner tube he had left by a nearby river. His escape was aided by having a job posting he had made on Craigslist asking for other people to show up outside the bank, dressed in a yellow safety vest, blue shirt, respirator mask and safety goggles.
Sure. There’s Léon (The Cleaner) with Jean Reno where the main character aaaalmost pulls it off, and The Negociator (with Samuel Motherfucking Jackson) and what spawned this topic, an episode of Supernatural. Those are the three that spring to mind, but I’m sure there are others.
BTW, just to mention what hasn’t yet been mentioned: avoiding this scenario is one of the reasons why many police departments will restrain and/or handcuff every person found at a crime scene, no matter how obviously innocent-looking they may appear to be.
Better to temporarily restrain and interrogate everyone than face the chance that one of the bad guys escaped through lazy police work.