LEWISTON – His long fingers glide over the computer keyboard. A city map carved into lined quadrants pops up on the monitor. Red dots mark robbed banks. Black dots are possible targets.
Another computer screen on his desk blinks. Grainy color photos show a disguised man standing inside various banks. That’s the suspect arrested Monday, he says, pointing at the surveillance pictures.
Uniformed cops are dispatched to the streets of Lewiston. But Andrew Robitaille’s beat is confined to this small windowless office. He is dressed in a white, buttoned-down shirt and navy blue slacks. Tall, slim and bespectacled, he looks more like an accountant than a crime fighter.
“Sometimes, it’s nice to be the guy in the shadows,” he says.
One of only three crime analysts at Maine’s municipal police departments, Robitaille’s skill at spotting trends and sorting facts is the envy of other city cop shops.
Auburn’s deputy chief credited Robitaille Monday with figuring out when and where the next in a series of banks would be robbed. Based on his data crunching, authorities from local police to the FBI fanned out across that city Monday to catch a robbery suspect. And they did. Just exactly when Robitaille said they would.
It’s not an exact science. A month ago, he predicted the date and time and street a bank would be robbed. He was right. But the bank turned out to be in Lisbon, not the Twin Cities. He took some ribbing for that call.
“Even still, we knew we were on the right track,” he says. The next time, they nailed him.
Robitaille spent months poring over data from earlier bank robberies. Which dates, what time of day. Twice in November, once in December, twice in February, once in March, he says without consulting his notes.
He plotted the heists on a map. He plugged in the names of the bank branches.
He also studied the amount of money the man stole. He calculated how long the money would last each time and predicted when the robber would need more.
“It all happened right here,” he says, sweeping a hand across the cramped room.
All of the techniques he used are standard in the crime analysis field, he says. A thick text on the subject sits on his tidy desktop. He confers regularly with his counterparts in Brunswick and Portland, sharing information and comparing methods.
He never studied the subject in school. He dropped out after a year of college. It was a waste of time, he said.
“I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do,” he says. “It was worthless to get a degree.”
Robitaille, 28, learned his computer skills at home, playing video games and surfing the Internet back when it was just a collection of bulletin boards.
He took a job in 1997 as a 911 dispatcher. Six years later, when the position of crime analyst opened up, he jumped. His goal: work in a crime lab. But for now, this is the ideal job, he says.
He never considered putting on a uniform.
“I always said I’d make a great detective but a terrible street cop,” he says. “That’s not my style. The confrontation, the mean streets.” But in the police business, you work your way up to that rank.
Although he’s a civilian, the men and women dressed in blue seem to accept him as one of their own.
A big cop sporting a leather jacket pauses when he sees Robitaille’s open door.
“He’s the best,” the man says.
The bank robbery was the most notable case he’s worked on, Robitaille says. Other trends he’s spotted were burglaries, kids breaking windows and car break-ins.
He wades through data, matching nicknames, scars, tattoos and birth dates. His work has led police to serve hundreds of warrants for arrests.
“It’s pretty darn boring, but when you come up with that needle in a haystack, it’s pretty rewarding.”
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