Home | Title Page | Introduction | Background Information | Potential Benefits | Issues | Conclusion | Bibliography |
Facial compositing has greatly developed over the years in law enforcement agencies. While some may still use sketch artists to develop facial composites, other agencies have relied on the advancement in technology to do the work for them. Facial composites are used in various ways by the law enforcement including informing the public of possible threats and identifying a suspect through wanted notices. The Burlington Police Department is one of the agencies taking advantage of computerized facial composite systems which allows an officer to generate a witness’ interpretation of a suspect (Papandrea, 2009). Sketch artists are not very reliable because it is difficult to capture the exact facial structure being described by the witness. Although there are some flaws with the system, the composite drawings allow the police with a valuable aid to identify the perpetrator (Papandrea, 2009). One of the most well developed systems being used by law enforcement agencies today is the EvoFit software used in Britain. This system is constructed on a universal face coding scheme and an evolutionary interface which allows the witness to choose from a large selection of faces that seem to fit description of the offender (Rogers, 2007). Research has been conducted to determine the accuracy of the EvoFit. Currently, it has surpassed the performance of any other composite systems (Rogers, 2007). The traditional systems conduct the investigation by having a witness give a full description of the offender and then individually select certain facial features to construct the face (EvoFit, 2013). However, this technique is hard for the witness to overcome under a significant amount of pressure. EvoFit instead attempts to get the witness to recognize the face, rather than recall, by starting with a set of faces that have been randomly compiled from different features then creating variations of that face until the final outcome is reached (EvoFit, 2013).