Catching more offenders with EvoFIT facial composites: Lab research and Police field trials.

Often, the only evidence of an offender’s identity comes from the memory of an eyewitness. For over 12 years, we have been developing software called EvoFIT to help eyewitnesses recover their memories of offenders’ faces, to assist police investigations. EvoFIT requires eyewitnesses to repeatedly select from arrays of faces, with ‘breeding’, to ‘evolve’ a face. Recently, police forces have been formally evaluating EvoFIT in criminal cases. The current paper describes four such police audits. It is reported that EvoFIT composites directly led to an arrest in 25.4% of cases overall; the arrest rate was 38.5% for forces that used a newer, less detailed face-recall interview. These results are similar to those found in the laboratory using simulated procedures. Here, we also evaluate the impact of interviewing techniques and outline further work that has improved system performance

Giving crime the 'evo': catching criminals using EvoFIT facial composites

Facial composites are traditionally made by witnesses and victims describing and selecting parts of criminals’ faces, but this method is hard to do and has been shown to be generally ineffective. We have been working on an alternative system called EvoFIT for the past 12 years. Much of the development for this system has been carried out in the laboratory but, more recently, police forces have been formally evaluating it in criminal investigations. The current paper describes three of these police audits. It was found that EvoFIT composites made from real eyewitnesses led to an overall arrest in 23.4% of cases, which is similar to a 24.5% correct naming level found by laboratory research. System performance therefore appears to be effective both using simulated testing procedures and in the hands of the intended user