CO -Police Stop, Handcuff Every Adult at Intersection

[C-dub]

How many LEOs does it take to secure an intersetion with 20 vehicles before one of them drives off? Also, how dumb do the actual robbers have to be to just sit there and not try to drive away when they see this beginning to happen?

I was also thinking about the old rule about something you're looking for always being in the last place you look and wondering why they would even bother searching some cars for people that didn't fit the "profile." Or did they not want to be accused of profiling.

[sjfcontrol]

It changes the odds because if you rightly assume that the BG may not be in one of the 20 cars then you are no longer limiting the probabilities to 20 cars. You would have to calculate how far the BG could have traveled in every route available to him. Then you would have to estimate the total number of vehicles in that area. Then you would use that number in relationship to the 20 cars that were stopped to determine the probability that he was even in one of the 20 cars. Unless of course you believe that the tip was iron clad.

Well, that's obviously a different problem all together. Conceptually that could then involve the search of every car in the entire town -- and that assumes that they could throw up road-blocks at all egresses before the vehicle could have exited the town. Now we're just getting silly (not that the original solution wasn't). There's no way they could stop everybody in a vehicle in the whole town. There wouldn't be enough cops (or handcuffs, for that matter). Seems to me they either had to find him at the intersection in question, or he was 'in the wind'.

Remember we are discussing probabilities, not practicalities. If you want to calculate the probability of the BG being in one of the 20 cars (without giving credence to the tip) you can't ignore the probability that he wouldn't be there at all. It may be silly to you but you can't properly calculate the probability any other way.
Now, if you want to qualify that the tip assures that one of the 20 cars contains the BG, then that is a different story.

I think I'll stick to my original analysis of the probabilities considering he may not be in one of the cars at the intersection. If he's there, the probability of being in the last car is 5%. If he isn't there, it's 0%. Therefore, the probability that he's in the last car, even considering that he may not be there at all, is NO GREATER than 5%. We don't have enough data to calculate the probability of him being in some other car somewhere else in town. However, you could make the argument that if you account for every car in town, the probability he's in the last car (or any car) in the original intersection would approach 0%.