I think a little punk like Cairo would’ve copped a plea with the D.A. and rolled over on his partners in a heartbeat, minimizing his sentence.
I haven’t looked it up, but my recollection is that Simpson was charged under a kidnapping offence that sounded like the Canadian offence of unlawful confinement - restricting the other person’s freedom of movement, but not taking them away to a different location, which is how kidnapping is usually defined.
From this list of charges against Simpson (from Wikipedia), it would appear that you are correct about ‘kidnapping’ being the term used to represent the act of holding someone at gunpoint in (in this case) a hotel room:
O. J. Simpson robbery case - Wikipedia
Of course this isn’t the “pure” scenario (of legal entry + legal possession of gun under a permit + no damage or injury inflicted + no robbery), since robbery did occur (items were taken from the room). Still, interesting that in this US case “kidnapping” was used to represent a situation in which the victim was not taken anywhere. I would guess that the “assault” counts also refer to the holding of the gun on the victims, given that there don’t seem to be any allegations that the guns were fired or used to physically impact the victims (“pistol-whipping” or the like).
If no witnesses, then the cops couldn’t care less.
Good point. If there are no injuries, nothing missing, and no damage to property–and no footage or witnesses --then the authorities might not even consider prosecuting.
This would be aside from situations in which one person is trying to get a restraining order against another. If the gun-pointing person had been known to engage in “holding at gunpoint” in the past, then that might impress the police, at least to the extent of supporting the issuance of a restraining order.
That’s not true. If it were, who’d ever be arrested for mugging? That’s another crime that generally doesn’t have any outside witnesses and, if the mugger has a few minutes to pull out the cash and dispose of the wallet, may not have any physical evidence either. So it’s a crime of “he said vs he said”.
And the police will follow up. They’ll run the victim through mug shot books, arrest suspects, hold line-ups, question alibis, and - it the case looks reasonable - the DA will prosecute based on the victim’s testimony.
Presumably the same thing would have happened to Cairo. Spade would have called his friends on the force and told them Cairo had threatened him with a gun. The police would have checked Cairo’s record and seen he had an extensive criminal past which would make Spade’s statement credible.
As for motivation, arresting and convicting career criminals like Cairo is what the police do. They’d be happy is somebody gave them a solid case to lock him away on.