Eyewitness identification : improving police lineups for suspects with distinctive features
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
Eyewitnesses‘ descriptions of suspects often refer to distinctive facial
features, such as tattoos or scars, and the police have to decide how best to create
fair lineups in these circumstances. This issue, despite its importance, has attracted
insufficient attention in the eyewitness identification literature. Informed by the
Police and Criminal Evidence Act code of practice and current police practice, I
conducted an empirical evaluation of the different lineup techniques that
investigators currently use for suspects with distinctive features.
To ensure that a suspect does not stand out because of his distinctive feature,
and also to extract more information from the eyewitness, the police either replicate
the distinctive feature across all foils in the lineup or conceal the distinctive feature
on the face of the suspect. These techniques were tested either in a crossover
recognition-memory paradigm (Study 1), or in a lineup-identification paradigm
(Studies 2, 3, and 4), either in computer-based laboratory experiments or real-world
field experiments using both target-present and target-absent lineups. The results
showed that replication is a better technique than concealment. Compared to
concealment, replication increases target identifications in target present lineups—in
some cases by decreasing foil identifications in target-absent lineups. The hybrid-similarity
(HS) model of face recognition was used to assess whether it could be
applied in this domain. Across seven experiments (Studies 1, 2, and 3) and three
paradigms, the HS model was able to model the qualitative pattern of results.
The purpose of this experimental work was to demonstrate the importance of
constructing fair lineups for people with distinctive features and to provide results
that will have practical implications for legal contexts and will improve our
understanding of face recognition and recognition memory in general