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At the start of the movie Man on a Ledge, Nick Cassidy goes to some lengths to make it hard for the police to discover his identity by using a false credit card and wiping his prints from the hotel room before he gets onto the ledge.

But some of the policemen at the scene have previous involvement with Englander, the character Cassidy is very publicly accused of stealing from.

So how come they didn't recognize him sooner?

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    I am not sure I am following you correctly.What do you mean by how come they didn't recognise him sooner? You said this is at the start of the movie, how come it is expected for the policemen to have identified him sooner?
    – Mistu4u
    Feb 11, 2013 at 3:43
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    @Mistu4u Cassidy is an ex policeman recently convicted of a major crime against Englander and he is an escaped convict. But even the cops working for Englander don't seem to recognise him when they see him. Surely some would have recognised him? He isn't physically disguised in any way.
    – matt_black
    Feb 11, 2013 at 9:31
  • @matt_black The cops working for Englander simply did not see him. As Nishant writes in his perfectly correct answer, there are very few people who actually clearly saw his face and it isn't a big stretch that they were not that involved in the whole case at all, so only possibly knew him from news footage or office talk, and that was 2 years ago. This difficulty to remember for the non-ivolved is also shown when Det. Dougherty says something like "I knew I'd seen him before" when it's finally revealed, but you usually just don't expect/remember someone from 2 year old news footage.
    – Napoleon Wilson ♦
    Sep 12, 2014 at 20:32

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This is what I think...

Cassidy goes to such lengths to destroy his prints, because he knew that his identity would become public as sooner or later he will be recognized, thus this will buy him some time and his brother could work in the other building easily. This can be proven in the scene when cops are able to identify him, they immediately send men in the building where Cassidy's brother is.

More cops didn't recognize him sooner despite the fact that he was well known for the robbery is because that robbery happened 2 years before he stood up on the ledge. Plus till the helicopter comes around and shows his face on camera, not many were able to see his face.

According to me its not an inconsistency but shows the human tendency to forget things as time goes by...

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