Super-recognizers
Unreal story in The New Yorker (albeit from 2016) - The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face: London’s new squad of “super-recognizers” could inspire a revolution in policing.
Given how adept the super-recognizers have proved at solving property crimes, it seems likely that they will eventually find weightier applications for their gifts. Counterterrorism is one field in which powers of facial recognition could make a difference. In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, authorities raced to identify the two bombers by using CCTV footage that had captured their faces before the blast. The F.B.I. crowd-sourced the problem, releasing the images to the public. Amateur sleuths on Reddit pinpointed several innocent students (and one person who was dead). Having a squad of super-recognizers at the F.B.I. could be useful not just in making identifications but in guarding against misidentifications…
The super-recognizers already have made a difference in U.K. law. Traditionally, an officer who identified someone in court had to demonstrate prior acquaintance with the individual. But the super-recognizers have succeeded with prosecutions in which they have offered “indirect identifications”—establishing familiarity with a suspect through repeated exposure to his likeness on CCTV. When I asked Neville how reliable this standard was, he replied, “I’ve never met Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager. But I would recognize him.”
The super-recognizers acknowledge that they are not infallible, which is why they have the peer-review process as a safeguard. According to statistics that they freely share with the press, seventy-three per cent of their identifications have led to criminal charges; many of these suspects, realizing that they have been caught in flagrante, plead guilty. But thirteen per cent of the unit’s identifications have been wrong. Sometimes the super-recognizers have identified someone as the culprit of a crime only to discover that the suspect was in jail when the incident took place. Porritt emphasized that suspects very seldom go to prison solely on the basis of their identifications. “It’s never our word alone that puts someone away,” he said. “What we do, by identifying suspects, is help direct the investigation.”
As interested and blown away as I am in this story and the human mind at large, I am glad the US (nor many other countries) does not have the CCTV system that Great Britain has, and a bunch of cops playing GUESS WHO?! with millions of private citizens’ images. Given the significant and scary limitations of computer recognition, nevermind of people, there’s an uncomfortable margin for error.
