Forensic Facial Composites
Charlie D. Frowd · 2021
For over four decades, witnesses to and victims of crime have created pictures of offenders they have seen at the scene of a crime. The resulting pictures, referred to as facial composites, are shown to law enforcement officers and members of the public with the aim that someone will name the person depicted and thereby help solve the crime. Considerable laboratory research and police field trials have investigated the effectiveness of facial composites, the result of which has allowed composite systems and forensic procedures to improve and evolve. This chapter will provide an overview of composite systems available to law enforcement—past, present and potential future. As will be seen, forensic systems have changed considerably over time. When tested using the ‘gold’ standard procedure that appropriately simulates real-world use of composites, it is evident that traditional approaches (based on selection of individual facial features) do not consistently produce faces that are identifiable to another person. Part of the reason for this unfortunate outcome is that the process used to create the face is at odds with the natural way that faces are recognised, as whole entities. However, more-recent advancements involve witnesses reflecting on the character of a target identity and selecting from arrays of whole faces (or whole-face regions); also, whole-face procedures have been developed to improve recognition of finished composites. Importantly, when such procedures are combined, composites can now be constructed that are identified with a very high level of success, a situation that seemed almost inconceivable even a decade ago.