From having worked in the financial sector, there are a number of things wrong with what happened to this family.
First, if you need to verify the check, you just call the other bank. Now, sometimes the other bank will not verify over the phone, in which case you can accept the check, but put a hold on the majority of the funds if there is a concern about its legitimacy. All of this can be done very discreetly, so that nobody else in the bank even realizes that there is a potential issue. The guy even says that he was willing to just put it on deposit and let it sit, so it wasn’t like he was trying to walk out with cash in hand. So that’s mistake 1.
Whoever called the cops is mistake 2. If you are at a bank, unless someone is becoming violent, you do not call the police. It creates too much confusion and makes people think that there is a dangerous situation. Not being able to verify a check is not a dangerous situation, but if there’s a police cruiser in the parking lot with lights flashing and they are bringing someone out in cuffs, it better be because they tried to rob the place or became hostile (at least that’s what I was taught when I was trained as a teller). If you think the check is a fraud, you take the check, get an ID, request an address and phone number where they can be reached, take a copy of everything and let them go on their way, telling them you will contact them when you are able to verify the check. If the check is legit, you have all the stuff you need to do the deposit. If its a fraud, you have everything you need to locate this person (including what they look like), plus you have the check in your possession, meaning they can’t try to pull this ruse on anyone else. Simple. Efficient. Discreet.
If Emprise’s policies were followed correctly, their policies need some serious work because that was handled poorly. They caused a scene and violated these individuals’ privacy - not because of the news article, but because of the scene at the bank. To everyone that was in the branch at the time (no idea if it was busy or not), it appeared that they had committed a crime when they had not. That is a significant privacy violation. The policies Emprise had should have at the very least protected against that. If they didn’t (or don’t), that’s Mistake 3, and that goes all the way up to the top of the food chain within the bank.
Mistake 4 belongs to the police. Why handcuff them and take them into custody? Why call the child’s school? There are much better ways to handle this, particularly if they couldn’t verify the check in branch without taking them into custody. If WPD’s policies are such that they take people into custody when information can’t be verified (but without proof of a crime, or even probable cause) then that’s pretty damning as well.
I would love to hear the explanation of why they thought a crime was likely in this case. Many banks (particularly the bigger ones, but certainly not limited to them) will not verify over the phone. They just won’t. Everyone within the banking/financial industry knows this. Because of that, it’s not probable cause of a crime simply because you can’t verify a large check. You need something else. Just a shaky overall situation.
This was just poorly handled on all sides. It never should have escalated beyond the teller level, but once it did, the head teller, or branch manager, or police or someone should have put the brakes on this getting this out of hand. That none of them did is pretty embarrassing.
