A crime scene getaway is the act of fleeing the location where one has broken the law in order to avoid apprehension by law enforcement. It is an act that the offender(s) may or may not have planned in detail, resulting in a variety of outcomes.
In some places, the very act of making a getaway from a crime scene is a criminal offense in itself, though it is generally viewed as natural behavior for a lawbreaker.
A motor vehicle, commonly referred to as a getaway car, is frequently used by the offender to flee the scene of a crime. Getaway cars are prevalent in crimes such as bank robberies. Very frequently, but not always, a getaway car is stolen and is abandoned soon after the crime in hopes that the vehicle cannot be traced to the offender. While witnesses to the crime will often attempt to take note of the tags or other important details of the car and report this information to law enforcement, if the vehicle does not belong to the owner and is quickly abandoned, a trace may not be possible without examination of forensic evidence. It may be possible, however, to identify the offender if an officer spots the offender in possession of the vehicle prior to its abandonment, or if a witness follows the offender to the point of abandonment, and observes the offenders tracks from beyond this point. Such civilian involvement, though, may be dangerous, and is generally not recommended by police departments.
In some cases, the offender may go to extreme measures to discard the getaway vehicle in order to hide his tracks. These may include dumping it in a river or setting it on fire. While this may not make solving the crime impossible, it can make the effort more difficult for law enforcement.
The earliest robbers known to have made such use of an automobile were the anarchist-inspired Bonnot Gang, active in Paris of the early 1910's. Later, the method was used by John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, whose exploits got wide media attention and inspired many less-known robbers.