Abstract

Often the only evidence of an offender s identity comes from the memory of an eyewitness For over 12 years we have been developing software called EvoFIT to help eyewitnesses recover their memories of offenders faces to assist police investigations EvoFIT requires eyewitnesses to repeatedly select from arrays of faces with breeding to evolve a face Recently police forces have been formally evaluating EvoFIT in criminal cases The current paper describes four such police audits It is reported that EvoFIT composites directly led to an arrest in 25 4 of cases overall the arrest rate was 38 5 for forces that used a newer less detailed face-recall interview These results are similar to those found in the laboratory using simulated procedures Here we also evaluate the impact of interviewing techniques and outline further work that has improved system performance