Post by Webster on Jun 14, 2015 12:27:23 GMT -5
BBC News: The Superpower Police Use To Tackle Crime
-Read more: www.bbc.com/future/story/20150611-the-superpower-police-now-use-to-tackle-crime?ocid=global_future_rss
...thoughts?
On 28 August 2014, 14-year-old Alice Gross went missing in West London. She was last seen on CCTV walking along a canal towpath in the summer rain, toting her black backpack. London’s Metropolitan Police deployed their biggest search party since the 2005 London bombings – a team of 600 officers spread across eight forces – to find her. But it was only after using the CCTV to piece together the events that they discovered the teenager’s body, nearly five weeks later, in the River Brent. They also zeroed in on a suspect: Latvian construction worker Arnis Zalkalns.
Throughout the operation, a special team of 10 officers in the Metropolitan Police were testing out their skills formally for the very first time. They were called the super-recognisers. “The attitude used to be anyone with two eyes can view CCTV, but not everyone sees things in the same way,” says Ch Det Insp Mick Neville, head of the Central Forensic Image Team. This elite group viewed thousands of hours of grainy, low-quality footage and, within days, identified both the victim and the as-yet-unknown suspect Zalkalns. They also were able to map out their movements precisely enough to draw a timeline and help conclude the case. Their special skill? A super-human ability to instantly recognise faces they barely know.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand why some people have the skill and how it works. Progress is being made in identifying who possesses it, though – and there is even an online test anyone can take to see if they might qualify.
“If you have experiences where you often recognise people out of context, that's an indicator. If you’re more likely to recognise someone else than they are to recognise you, then that's an indicator,” says psychologist Richard Russell of Gettysburg College in Philadelphia, who first coined the term ‘super-recogniser’ in a paper he published in 2009. “Many describe not being sure whether to go up to someone – often it’s someone they knew only incidentally, and they fear they may come across as a stalker. Some report just faking not to know people.”
Russell became curious about super-recognisers in 2006, when he was at Harvard University studying prosopagnosics: people with very poor ability to recognise faces. He discovered it was a far more common affliction than he expected; about 2% of people he tested fell somewhere on the low end of the spectrum. “So I thought that suggested there were people on the other end of the scale too – with extraordinary abilities,” he says.
When he started looking, he found super-recognisers across the United States. One of his subjects, Jennifer Jarett, is a 44-year-old police misconduct investigator in New York City. Her first memory of her talent was when she was 15 and on a family vacation in Hawaii. “I spotted a man sitting a few rows ahead on our plane. I told my family he was famous and had been on a tonne of TV shows, like Murder She Wrote and the Bionic Woman. They just laughed at me because no one recognised him,” she says.
Later that summer, the man she had spotted, Granville Van Dusen, played a bit part in the show Family Ties. “So it became a family joke. That's when they realised I was unimpeachable when I recognised someone,” she laughs.
Throughout the operation, a special team of 10 officers in the Metropolitan Police were testing out their skills formally for the very first time. They were called the super-recognisers. “The attitude used to be anyone with two eyes can view CCTV, but not everyone sees things in the same way,” says Ch Det Insp Mick Neville, head of the Central Forensic Image Team. This elite group viewed thousands of hours of grainy, low-quality footage and, within days, identified both the victim and the as-yet-unknown suspect Zalkalns. They also were able to map out their movements precisely enough to draw a timeline and help conclude the case. Their special skill? A super-human ability to instantly recognise faces they barely know.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand why some people have the skill and how it works. Progress is being made in identifying who possesses it, though – and there is even an online test anyone can take to see if they might qualify.
“If you have experiences where you often recognise people out of context, that's an indicator. If you’re more likely to recognise someone else than they are to recognise you, then that's an indicator,” says psychologist Richard Russell of Gettysburg College in Philadelphia, who first coined the term ‘super-recogniser’ in a paper he published in 2009. “Many describe not being sure whether to go up to someone – often it’s someone they knew only incidentally, and they fear they may come across as a stalker. Some report just faking not to know people.”
Russell became curious about super-recognisers in 2006, when he was at Harvard University studying prosopagnosics: people with very poor ability to recognise faces. He discovered it was a far more common affliction than he expected; about 2% of people he tested fell somewhere on the low end of the spectrum. “So I thought that suggested there were people on the other end of the scale too – with extraordinary abilities,” he says.
When he started looking, he found super-recognisers across the United States. One of his subjects, Jennifer Jarett, is a 44-year-old police misconduct investigator in New York City. Her first memory of her talent was when she was 15 and on a family vacation in Hawaii. “I spotted a man sitting a few rows ahead on our plane. I told my family he was famous and had been on a tonne of TV shows, like Murder She Wrote and the Bionic Woman. They just laughed at me because no one recognised him,” she says.
Later that summer, the man she had spotted, Granville Van Dusen, played a bit part in the show Family Ties. “So it became a family joke. That's when they realised I was unimpeachable when I recognised someone,” she laughs.
-Read more: www.bbc.com/future/story/20150611-the-superpower-police-now-use-to-tackle-crime?ocid=global_future_rss
...thoughts?