Software Matches Police Sketches To Mugshots

Zothecula writes "We've seen it in numerous TV shows and movies – the witness to a crime looks through a book of mug shots, then works with a police sketch artist to come up with a likeness of the nasty person they saw. After looking through hundreds of mug shots, however, it's possible that the tired-brained witness could look right at a photo of the guilty party and not recognize them. It's also possible that there is a mug shot of the criminal on a database somewhere out there, but that this particular witness will never see it. A computer system being pioneered at Michigan State University, however, could be the solution to such problems – it automatically matches faces in police sketches to mug shots."

Re:Can't wait to be misidentified...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about your driver's license [utoronto.ca]?

Only if you're a criminal!

[chaboud]

You have nothing to fear if you aren't a criminal. They're talking about mug-shots, not the readily available photo ID, license, and passport databases.

And we're talking about sketches from eye witnesses, people who perfectly saw the criminals in question, with near-perfect vision, spot-on memory, and the utterly transparent interpretations of police sketch artists. There is absolutely no way that a system never tested broadly against false positives could be used to improperly find the innocent guilty.

I mean, look at fingerprinting.

We have to trust that the government and police have our best interests in mind. If you can't turn to the frighteningly powerful to protect your civil rights, who can you turn to?

/hebetude

Re:This isn't really a terrible idea

[Attila Dimedici]

I agree, except for the fact that too many people have the idea that, "The computer matched them up, so it must be correct."

Re:Only if you're a criminal!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have nothing to fear if you aren't a criminal. They're talking about mug-shots, not the readily available photo ID, license, and passport databases.

And we're talking about sketches from eye witnesses, people who perfectly saw the criminals in question, with near-perfect vision, spot-on memory, and the utterly transparent interpretations of police sketch artists. There is absolutely no way that a system never tested broadly against false positives could be used to improperly find the innocent guilty.

I mean, look at fingerprinting.

We have to trust that the government and police have our best interests in mind. If you can't turn to the frighteningly powerful to protect your civil rights, who can you turn to?

That this was modded insightful is far more terrifying than the actual system.

Re:Only if you're a criminal!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be a criminal to have a mug shot taken. I'm sure there are many people who have had mug shots taken where the charges have been dropped prior to formal arraignment, let alone cases where the defendant has been found not guilty.

Could be good, will probably be bad

[NoSig]

This is great IF it does not in any way count as evidence against the identified person - this system should only serve as a way for the police to get someone to investigate that might then later be found to be guilty on other grounds. The reason for this is that eye witnesses are not reliable, so if you make them go through a million photos, they ARE going to get it wrong. The best they can do is to identify a few pictures that kind of look like the person they saw, but we humans are more likely to arbitrarily choose one picture out of the likely candidates to be the RIGHT one, instead of admitting that we can't say for sure. Making the computer eliminate most of the less likely matches only increases the unreliability of the system because eye witnesses can then in effect look through even more pictures in less time leading to an even higher false positive rate.

It's also OK to put someone the police suspects on other grounds in a lineup and have the witness pick that person out. What's bad is combining the two things by having the computer select a likely match and put that person in the lineup based solely on matching the witness description - that has all the same problems as having the witness go through the database themselves. The problem is that a computer system with millions of entries is always going to produce a person who looks a lot like the right guy, even if the actual right guy isn't in the database at all, and that is going to make many witnesses identify the wrong guy based on striking similarity.

The even bigger problem is that this problem is not obvious and many juries and even some defense lawyers aren't going to understand the problem correctly - "he says this guy attacked him, what more is there to say in this matter? Guilty!"