Did my bride have porn past? A task for the ‘super recognisers’
Officer whose team helped crack 2,500 crimes in a year now available for hire
THE police chief who created Britain’s first “super recognisers” has admitted one of his first customers after taking his work private was a man who wanted to check whether his fiancée had appeared in pornographic films.
As head of the Metropolitan Police’s forensics images team, Det Ch Ins Mick Neville led the identification hunt for suspects in the London riots in 2011 and went on to set up the unit of officers with a unique ability to remember or identify faces.
Now in the private sector with a team of 40 freelancers, his clients range from police forces, governments and companies to individuals including an Indian businessman who had been told his bride appeared in porn films when she was younger.
Mr Neville deployed his team to watch grainy Xrated videos from the Nineties to check the allegation.
Super recognisers have an ability – said to be held by only 1 per cent of the population – to match identities to the poorest quality CCTV or video images.
“We had to watch these films and say is it her, yes or no? Luckily for her, she did not feature,” said Mr Neville, whose Scotland Yard unit helped solve 2,500 crimes from murders to thefts in 2016 alone, more than half of all those by the force’s entire forensics department.
Discretion stops him divulging more about the pornography case, but it is not the only unusual request he has received.
He has been asked by an American to establish if the girl who saw the apocalyptic visions in 1917 that comprise the Three Secrets of Fatima, one of the Catholic Church’s most famous prophecies, and who went on to become a nun, was an imposter. It is one of many conspiracy theories surrounding the story. “The Roman Catholic Church is said to have replaced this Fatima woman with a doppelganger,” said Mr Neville. “We reviewed the footage and said it was the same person. This US guy really wanted it not to be the same person. No doubt we are now seen as being part of the conspiracy too.”
The team, recruited through memory tests developed by Greenwich University, ranges from a session drummer, photographer and salesman to a retired policeman and teacher.
They help police forces and businesses trawl millions of hours of CCTV images to identify suspects in a crime. A partner specialist tech company uses AI software to filter the images to a manageable number, which super recognisers analyse to identify suspects.
Mr Neville has drawn up a super recogniser code of practice as he campaigns for it to be acknowledged officially as a branch of forensic science. “The point is that you must provide independent evidence to the best of your abilities, like a forensic scientist,” he said.
It comes amid controversy over the Met’s testing of facial recognition technology on the public in Westminster this week, although Mr Neville said such technology was not foolproof and still required staff to make the final link between an image and a suspect.
The key traits of a superrecogniser were short-term face recognition, long term memory and skills to spot faces in a crowd, said Mr Neville. “When I took two British special recognisers to Cologne in 2015 to help the German police identify sex attackers at the new year celebrations, they found their own kind [other superrecognisers] among the Germans. It was like some sort of alien race. They seemed to have some sort of connection,” he said.
‘It was like some sort of alien race. They seemed to have some sort of connection’