In February 1959 an armed robber held up a liquor store in southern California and made off which the takings, it was a typical small-time crime, but for one thing: the store owner gave Sheriff Peter Pitches of Los Angeles County Police a detailed description of the robber. This enabled the police to create a lifelike portrait of the wanted man.
Pictures of the robber were circulated in the area and, as a result of them, he was identified and arrested. He confessed to the crime and was duly punished – so becoming the first criminal in the world to be caught by means of Identikit.
The system had been conceived in the mid-1940s principally by Hugh C. McDonald, a detective with the Los Angeles Identification Bureau. Taking some 50,000 photographs of people’s faces, he cut them into some 12 main sections – and used them as the basis of what he called Identikit.
This consisted of almost 400 different and contrasting pairs of eyes, lips, noses, chins, hairlines, eyebrows, beards, moustaches and so on. To build up a likeness, the various features were drawn on transparent plastic sheets, which were changed and overlaid until a composite portrait was created that matched eyewitness descriptions of the wanted person.
The use of photographs or artists’ impressions to identify and apprehend criminals dates back to the 1880s in France. Then a French criminologist named Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system which he called portrait parle, or ‘speaking portrait’. It involved the use of front and side photographs of captured criminals, cut into sections and mounted so that particular features – a hooked nose, a pointed chin, protruding ears and so forth – could be studied.
In the mid-1970s a second and now more commonly used Identikit system was introduced in North America. It was developed by Pat Dunleavy, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and it uses plastic sheets which contain actual photographs of facial features.
In the United Kingdom a system called Photo-FIT (Facial Identification Technique) has been used by the police since 1970. It is also used in Australia where it is commonly known as the Penry system. Photo-FIT also uses real photographs of ‘ordinary’ people mounted on thin plastic sheets. The basic five-section kit consists of 195 hairlines, 99 eyes and eyebrows, 89 noses, 105 mouths, and 74 chins and cheeks, which enable billions of possible combinations to be assembled. Features such as facial hair and spectacles are available as overlays. The pieces are cut so that the length and width the composite face can be fitted into a frame which holds them in place.
The basic kit relates to Caucasian (white) faces and there are supplementary kits to give North American Indian, Indian subcontinent and Afro-Caribbean features. A kit has not yet been developed for Oriental faces, which are usually drawn by artists.
Witnesses of crimes are interviewed by the police as soon after the events as possible – most people’s ability to recall starts to diminish after about a week.
For both Photo-FIT and Identikit, detectives begin by asking witnesses to recall details of the crime itself. They then move on to general descriptions of the suspect or suspects. For instance, were they short and burly, or lean and tall? What sort of clothes were they wearing? And what did the suspects actually do at the scene of the crime? Only then are the witnesses asked about facial details.
They leaf through books, or ‘feature atlases’ containing the various Photo-FIT or Identikit sheets, from which they make their selections. Faces are put together sheet by sheet, or strip by strip.
Often, a police artist is then called in to heighten the picture. A clear plastic sheet is laid over it and fine details such as hair shade, skin blemishes, scars or shaped eyebrows are added. The picture is then covered with an artist’s fixative spray and is signed by the witness.
Recently, computer technology has been introduced to enhance the pictures. This enables extremely lifelike faces to be drawn n computer screens according to eyewitness, descriptions, and fine alterations can be made to the image. From this, a photograph-like print can be obtained.
In addition, police mugshots (photographs of arrested criminals) can be stored on computer. They are coded according to physical characteristics and the computer can choose a selection which most closely matches witness descriptions.
Picture Credit : Google