Identification of the Living Familiar face recognition

The task of the police officer investigating a crime, or of the forensic anthropologist working with human remains, is to establish an identity of a criminal or of a victim. This often involves working with images of faces – building a composite image from the memory of a witness to the crime, seeking CCTV images of the person or persons who might have committed the crime, or building a model of the face of an unknown person from their skull. Many of the chapters in this volume describe the processes involved in such reconstructions. Once an image of a face is obtained, however, it needs to be identified. TV programmes such as Crimewatch in theUK (seewww.bbc.co.uk/crimewatch) often display witness-generated facial composites or CCTV images of people associated with crimes which sometimes result in people volunteering new information; Richard Neave’s constructed image of the unidentified victim 115 of the London Underground tube station fire at Kings Cross in 1987 (Chambers 2007) was displayed widely in newspapers and posters. CCTV images of the London ‘nail bomber’ in 1999 led to hundreds of responses, including one phone call from a man who named a work colleague, David Copeland, as resembling the images. This crucial lead quickly led to the arrest of David Copeland, unfortunately not soon enough to prevent the third devastating bomb attack on The Admiral Duncan, a London pub. While the problems of building or using images of unfamiliar faces are the subject of many other chapters in this volume, here I focus on relevant issues about the identification of familiar faces, and also elaborate on the contrast between familiar and unfamiliar face recognition.