Foiling with friendliness

You may have heard of killing with kindness? A special agent with the FBI has come up with a system for foiling bank robberies with friendliness.

Excessive friendliness is the key to the "Safecatch" system created by FBI Special Agent Larry Carr. The premise is that an overdose of courtesy will unnerve would-be robbers and get them to rethink the crime. "If you're a legitimate customer, you think, ‘This is the friendliest person I've met in my life.' If you're a bad guy, it scares the lights out of you," said Drew Ness, a vice president of Bellevue-based First Mutual Bank, who advocates the approach.

The article cites one example where they're pretty sure they scared off a bank robber with a known MO. (Though, since he wasn't detained, they'll never know.) As Bruce Scnheier points out, the result of a false positive is that a legitimate customer gets really, really good service that time. Why does it work? "The guilty flee when no man pursueth."