More of What Chiefs Need to Know About Eyewitness Identification

The recent article by in Police Chief by Sheri H. Mecklenburg, Patricia J. Bailey, and Mark R. Larson titled “Eyewitness Identification: An Update on What Chiefs Need to Know” (July 2013) was a timely reminder that law enforcement agencies need to develop clear and defensible procedures for obtaining and documenting eyewitness identification evidence. A national survey of law enforcement agencies conducted in 2011 by the Police Executive Research Forum and funded by the National Institute of Justice gives a sense of where U.S. law enforcement agencies are at in this process of developing eyewitness identification procedures. Using a stratified random sample of U.S. law enforcement agencies, the PERF/NIJ survey obtained data from 619 agencies. Despite the widespread attention that has been given to the issue of mistaken eyewitness identification, especially over the last decade, 64% of the agencies reported having no written policies for the construction or administration of photo lineups and 84% reported having no written policies for the construction or administration of live lineups. Mecklenburg, Bailey, and Larson (MB&L) focused only on two aspects of eyewitness identification procedures, namely the sequential lineup as an alternative to the simultaneous lineup and the use of a blind administrator for administering lineups rather than the more typical practice of permitting the case investigator to administer his or her own lineups. There are other issues as well, such as how witnesses are instructed prior to the lineup, how fillers are selected for the lineup, securing a statement of certainty from witnesses at the time of any identification, and so on. All of these need to be considered in developing an eyewitness identification policy. But my commentary will focus almost exclusively on the issue of sequential and double-blind lineup procedures because that is what MB&L chose to target. According to the results of the national PERF/NIJ survey, 31% of law enforcement agencies were using double-blind procedures in 2011 and 32% were using sequential procedures. And this 2011 survey already underestimates the current percentages (e.g., since that time many jurisdictions, such as the entire states of Ohio and Connecticut, have switched to double-blind, sequential, or both). I encourage police chiefs to check with jurisdictions that now have many years of experience with double-blind and sequential procedures (such as New Jersey, North Carolina, Santa Clara County, CA, and cities such as Boston and Dallas) to see what their experience has been. Police chiefs are no doubt already well aware of the fact that 75% of DNA exonerations are cases involving mistaken eyewitness identification, so I will not dwell on that point. At the end of this commentary, however, I will show the results of another type of data with which most people are not familiar, which is based on outcomes from thousands of lineups. But my intent in this commentary is to correct what I believe are specious or incomplete arguments and selective reports of what the scientific data show on simultaneous and sequential procedures. The most efficient way for me to do this is by using quotes from the Mecklenburg, Bailey, and Larson article and then commenting on each point.