When a police line-up with six one-eyed men is better than a line-up with none

You're mugged by a man with a patch over digit eye. You exposit him and his characteristic attendance to the police. They post a one-eyed suspect and inform him to you in a video line-up with five clear \"foils\". If this suspect is the only person in the line-up with digit eye, prior research shows you're highly probable to pick him discover modify if, in every another respects, he actually bears little resemblance to your mugger. So the challenge is: How to make police line-ups fairer for suspects who have an extraordinary characteristic feature?

Police in the army and UK currently ingest two strategies - digit is to conceal the suspect's characteristic feature (and tell the attestator they've done so); the another is to ingest make-up, theatrical props or Photoshop to grace the another members of the line-up with the aforementioned characteristic feature. Now Theodora Zarkadi and her colleagues have compared both approaches and institute the fairer method is to flex the extraordinary feature.

Zarkadi's aggroup presented 110 undergrads with 32 photos of real-life inmates condemned from the Florida Department of Corrections website. Photoshop was used to apply characteristic features including tattoos and piercings. Six of these characteristic \"suspect\" offenders were then embedded, digit each, in sextet picture line-ups alongside five previously unseen \"innocent\" offenders. The participants' task was to pick discover the suspect in each line-up.

The key finding is that the students made significantly more correct identifications when the innocents had been presented an identical characteristic feature compared with when the suspects' extraordinary feature had been unseeable (approx 58 per cent quality vs. most 39 per cent).

This plus was replicated in a second research in which the suspect was sometimes absent from the line-ups (akin to what can happen in actual life). In this case, when the suspect was present, identification was again more accurate when the innocents also appeared with the aforementioned characteristic feature (approx 50 per cent vs. 30 per cent). When the suspect was missing from the line-up (i.e. sextet innocents appeared), the students made simulated identifications on most 60 per cent of occasions, but this figure wasn't affected by whether the suspect, when present, had his extraordinary feature hidden, or if instead his feature was replicated in the innocents.

\"Police officers should be alive of this ... falsifiable result when constructing line-ups for suspects with characteristic features and should flex rather than conceal these features,\" the researchers said.

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Zarkadi T, Wade KA, & Stewart N (2009). Creating Fair Lineups for Suspects With Distinctive Features. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID.