Problems with police sketch artists revealed
A study of composite sketches by Charlie Frowd, of the University of Stirling in Scotland, had participants study a photograph of an individual for a full minute, then describe the face for a trained police sketch artist. How well could people then recognize the faces in these sketches? The recognition rate was as low as 3%.
Current stats indicate that on average, hand-drawn police sketches are only about 9 percent accurate.
"Computer generated composites are only about 5 percent accurate in helping to accurately identify suspects."
When witnesses choose photos from a photo array, they often choose not the one that closest resembles the culprit, but instead pick the one that looks different from the rest — and when a picture has been chosen, that image often replaces the image in the witness’ memory. She now remembers that face as being the face of her attacker, even though it wasn’t. This method of scrambling digital faces poses the same problems.
Police currently use two computer generated composites called IdentiKit which has a 3% recognition rate and EvoFit which claims to have a 25% recognition rate or one in four.
For more information about identifying people click here to see the MIT study and here to see the Claremont Univ. study.
Two more great reads on the subject are:
" Building Face Composites Can Harm Lineup Identification Performance"
" An Evaluation Of U.S. Systems For Facial Composite Production"