Identity charades

To The Sunday Times

Your reporter Emily Dugan is right to say that identity parades are very unreliable. I took part in one some years ago, with unexpected results.

I was on a course at Aberystwyth University with half a dozen other Army officers, and one Sunday morning we were invited to take part in a line-up. It was very much as one sees in TV dramas: we were lined up in a room and the suspect was brought in and allowed to choose his place in the line. The witnesses came in one at a time and surveyed the group. The first, an elderly woman, seemed very frightened and left saying she could not identify anyone. The second, a rather cocky man, strolled along the line, stopped, looked me up and down and exclaimed “This is ’im!”

There was much hilarity after he left the room. In other circumstances, though, the consequences could have been serious.

Lt Col Richard Bartle (retired), Shrivenham, Oxfordshire

To The Sunday Times

I was a police detective for many years. Identification evidence can be accurate. It can also be hopeless.

I once took about 30 witness statements after an armed robbery that had been committed in broad daylight in a busy city street. The offender, it seemed, was virtually every height between 5ft and 6ft 6in. He was every ethnicity. He was wearing a hat. He was also bare-headed. He was wearing, as far as I remember, about four different colours of coat.

We did catch him in the end, but only when he committed another robbery, in front of an off-duty police officer.

Piers Westlake, King’s Lynn, Norfolk