Scotland Yard’s secret weapon: the “super-recognisers”

Psychologists have discovered that some people have an extraordinary talent for remembering faces. At Scotland Yard, a small team of these “super-recognisers” is helping to crack the most difficult cases. Xan Rice reports

A successful thief sets his own rules, and the best ones live by them. These were some of Jimmy Mcnulty’s: target luxury stores only, dress as smartly as the wealthiest customer, engage and charm the salespeople. Never rush, never panic, and always trust in your powers of sleight of hand. Here he is at 12.59pm on 28 September 2013, ringing the bell of the Leica Store in Mayfair, where cameras sell for thousands of pounds. He is about 40 years old, with short, dark hair and of athletic build – Mcnulty is the name given to him by a detective who saw a resemblance to Dominic West’s character in the television series The Wire. He wears a pink dress shirt, a dark cardigan and jacket, smart shoes. He picks up a camera, and then a pair of binoculars, carefully appraising them. Two store assistants stand a few metres away. When they turn their backs, he slips the camera inside his jacket. He asks to be let out and casually strolls away. This is Mcnulty again at 4.39pm on 18 October 2014, sitting at a table in Buy Fine Diamonds, a retailer in Hatton Garden, London’s jewellery district. A salesman lays out a selection of bracelets. Mcnulty uses a jeweller’s loupe to examine several items. When the salesman stands up to retrieve a piece from a window display, Mcnulty strikes, pincering a bracelet and dropping it into his pocket. Now here he is at 6.27pm on 13 May 2015, at the Hackett clothing store on Regent Street. After slipping a few leather accessories into his jacket, Mcnulty picks up a pair of shoes from a display, walks to an empty sales counter and stuffs them down the front of his trousers.

That was his favourite place to hide stolen goods: merino wool jumpers, cashmere scarves, fancy shirts and wallets disappeared below his belt. He hit Salvatore Ferragamo on Sloane Street, Smythson on New Bond Street, Aquascutum on the Brompton Road. At Linda Farrow, an eyewear shop in Mayfair, he slipped a pair of sunglasses into his jacket and then, as if it were a game, asked the assistant for a business card. Mcnulty had a rule for CCTV cameras too: ignore them. More than 400,000 CCTV cameras watch over London, and most upmarket shops have them. But Mcnulty knew they were used mostly as deterrents. Even if the footage was sent to the police, at best he’d be fingered for a single crime, he thought. Unless, of course, they recognised him as a serial offender and found out his real name. What were the chances of that?

Two out of every 100 people are born with a condition called developmental prosopagnosia – meaning they have great difficulty

recognising faces, sometimes even their own in the mirror. In 2009, a trio of researchers led by Richard Russell published a study which aimed to determine if there was another group of people whose problem (or rather, talent) was that they struggled to forget a face. Russell, a psychologist then based at Harvard, tested four people claiming to have superior face recognition abilities, including a female student who told him: “It doesn’t matter how many years pass. If I’ve seen your face before, I will be able to recall it.” Russell set his subjects and a larger control group two tasks, involving famous and unfamiliar faces. In both, the test group performed “far above average”, leading Russell to coin the term “super-recognisers”.

Around the same time, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the London Metropolitan Police was reaching a similar conclusion. In 2007, Neville had set up a unit to collate and circulate images of unidentified criminals captured on CCTV. Officers were asked to check the Met’s “caught on camera” notices to see if they knew any of the suspects, either from the beat or from previous photographs. “It became apparent that some officers were much better than others,” Neville told me. “For example, if I received 100 names, some officers would have submitted ten or 15, while in the main they were one-off identifications.”

In August 2011, the London riots broke out. Met officers trawled through tens of thousands of hours of CCTV footage, identifying 609 suspects responsible for looting, arson and other criminal acts. One officer, PC Gary Collins, made 180 identifications, including that of one of the most high-profile suspects, who had thrown petrol bombs at police and set cars on fire. During the riots, the man covered his mouth and nose with a bandana and pulled a beanie low over his forehead. Collins recognised him as a criminal whom he had last seen several years earlier. The man was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

Now convinced of the super-recogniser theory, Neville assembled a standby team of 150 officers who excelled at identification. Over the next few years, as Mcnulty was stuffing luxury shoes into his trousers, the officers were deployed in high-profile investigations, including the Hillsborough inquests and the Alice Gross murder. Gross, a 14-year-old girl from west London, went missing as she walked along a canal towpath in August 2014. The Met operation to find her was the biggest since the London 7 July 2005 bombings. But it was only after ten of Neville’s superr-ecognisers were brought in that her body was discovered. The

“After the London riots, one officer made 180 identifications from CCTV – including a criminal with his face half-hidden behind a bandana”

team zeroed in on one of the suspects, a Latvian construction worker called Arnis Zalkalns, whose wife had reported him missing a few days after Gross disappeared. A CCTV clip showed Zalkalns cycling along the canal 12 minutes behind Gross. In footage from an off-licence later in the day, the officers recognised Zalkalns, who was buying a few Carlsbergs, and council cameras captured him cycling back to a particular spot on the River Brent at dusk. At his next sighting in a shop, later in the evening, he was wearing fresh clothes. The super-recognisers suspected that Zalkalns had changed because he had been back to the crime scene. They informed the officer in charge, who ordered a fresh search of the riverbank – and Gross’s carefully concealed body was found. In May 2015, the Super-recogniser Unit was established at New Scotland Yard, the first – and still the only – dedicated team of its kind in the world. Initially, it comprised four officers seconded from elsewhere in the force. (The unit now has six men and one woman.) Detective Sergeant Eliot Porritt, who had worked on the Alice Gross murder, was the most senior recruit. A 36-year-old former plain-clothes officer from north London, Porritt had been largely unaware of his superior face recognition skills until a few years ago. “As a boy, I watched The Terminator and Aliens with my father. I remember him being amazed when I noticed that an actor – Bill Paxton – was in both films, even though he looked different in each role,” Porritt told me. “But I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I assumed everybody saw what I saw.”

The main function of the super-recogniser officers was to attend large events, such as the Notting Hill Carnival, and spot criminals there. In their downtime, they were tasked with trawling through the Met’s forensic image database, which holds more than 100,000 stills of unidentified suspects captured on CCTV camera or on mobile phones in London since 2011. Each picture is linked to an unsolved crime – in essence, a cold case – and is tagged with the date, location and type of offence. As they scrolled through the images, the officers first checked whether they recognised anyone from their time on the streets or previous photos. The next challenge was to link suspects involved in multiple crimes, using their powers of recall to match images – a process they called “snapping”. “Basically we’re saying: ‘This guy and that guy in those two pictures are the same person – snap!’” Porritt told me. “And you’ve got two strands to it: the people we already know and who we try to link with as many crimes as possible; and people who we don’t know but who we still link and then try to identify.” It is difficult, painstaking work: the images are often grainy, the lighting poor, and camera angles awkward. Furthermore, a criminal’s appearance can change over time. But if snapping leads to an arrest, it is worth it: a person charged with multiple crimes is likely to be sent to prison, rather than receiving a suspended sentence and being left free to reoffend.

In early August 2015, one of Porritt’s junior colleagues (who asked for his name to be withheld) was looking at CCTV images from Kensington and Chelsea, where he had worked as a beat cop. The officer noticed the same, smartly dressed, thief in two stills taken in upmarket shops. Snap. Then another, and another – snap, snap. As he broadened his search to other affluent boroughs of London, the officer kept seeing the same face. He printed out the images of the serial shoplifter and tacked them to a wall in the office. He told me: “When I had 13 or 14 crimes, I said to Porritt: ‘There’s £35,000-worth of goods stolen by this guy. We need to do something.’” They downloaded the CCTV clips from where the stills had been taken. Mcnulty’s hands were so fast that in some cases the officers had to slow the footage down to ascertain exactly when the theft had occurred. “I hate using the words ‘talented’ or ‘good’ for a criminal, when they could be so many better things, like a street magician or a dextrous watchmaker,” said Porritt. “But when we watched him [Mcnulty], it was like: ‘That’s good.’”

Through tip-offs, the police learned that the man’s first name was Austin. Porritt’s colleague keyed the name into the Met’s custody image database, which stores mugshots of everyone arrested in the capital. There were 73 Austins. No. 14 looked familiar. “I think I’ve got him,” the officer shouted. Jimmy Mcnulty was Austin Caballero, a born-and-bred Londoner. He was on the arrests database because he had been caught stealing an expensive rug in January 2015, but the police, unaware of his other crimes, had freed him on bail.

By then, it was clear that the task of searching the database should be the primary focus of the Super-recogniser Unit, not just something to do in quiet times. The team had identified, apprehended and charged dozens of suspects, from shoplifters to perpetrators of assaults. (Three in every four of the unit’s completed cases have resulted in a suspect being charged in court – against fewer than one in five cases in the wider Met force.) Police in north London had obtained CCTV images of a man accused of sexually assaulting women on buses but were unable to identify him. Porritt and his colleague Alison Young used Oyster card data to map the suspect’s travel patterns, and noticed that he often began his journey at Camden Road overground station. One afternoon, they went there to make inquiries. While on the concourse, Young spotted the suspect – whom she had only seen in CCTV stills – passing through. “Oh my God, Porritt, that’s him,” she exclaimed. They ran after the man and slapped on handcuffs. (The sexual offender pleaded guilty in court and was convicted.)

Word of the Super-recogniser Unit’s success is now spreading. In January, Porritt flew to Cologne to advise German police investigating the mass sexual assaults that occurred in the city on New Year’s Eve. Enforcement agencies as far afield as India, Australia and the US have visited the unit, or requested information on its methods. One of the most common questions asked of the team is whether computers will put the super-recognisers out of a job. After all, some countries, including the UK, already use facial recognition technology at passport control. Porritt’s unit has its own software, but this has been responsible for only one of the 2,010 identifications made since May 2015. DCI Mick Neville reckons that it will be ten to 20 years before software is advanced enough to be a useful tool, and even then super-recognisers will still be needed to analyse the results and identify the suspects. Josh Davis, a University of Greenwich psychologist and expert on facial recognition, agrees. “Algorithms will get better and we will be able to build 3D representations of faces. But people change appearance and we as humans are primed to see through those changes.”

On 1 April, Caballero appeared at Blackfriars Crown Court and pleaded guilty to 42 charges. He was convicted and sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. But his name still features in the whiteboard list of “top ten serial offenders” in room 901 at Scotland Yard – and the number of his crimes is rising. For even though Caballero is now behind bars, his old thefts, caught on camera, are still being solved.

A longer version of this article first appeared in the New Statesman. © New Statesman.