Recruiting Eyewitness Science in Criminal Investigations: The Pocket Man Case

Abstract

Do surveillance shots and phantom drawings of the perpetrator in child abuse cases, images that are widely published in public media, contaminate the identifications made by young victims? This question was raised in the later phases of the investigations into a Norwegian child abuse case that involved a large number of victims, where a suspect was apprehended, and a photo lineup with the victims was planned. The police sought to answer the question by conducting a simple experiment: Two samples of participants–children in the age range of the real victims but from a different part of the country, and police cadets–were presented with the published photographs and drawings of the suspect; after a short interval, they were asked to pick the man they had seen in a 12-person photo lineup that was planned to be used with the real victims. The results showed that media exposure–surveillance shots and phantom drawings–in this case did not increase the probability of selecting the suspect. It is concluded that criminal investigations in some cases may profit from research evaluations of police procedures and eyewitness performance, supporting the investigative process by sorting out unreliable procedures and increasing the quality of the evidence.