Inside little-known super-spotters who help catch criminals – just 2% of UK have gift, find out if you're one of them

Scottish Sun

04-06-2025

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FACE OFF Inside little-known super-spotters who help catch criminals – just 2% of UK have gift, find out if you're one of them
GIFTED "super-spotters" who have enhanced facial recognition abilities could be used to thwart criminals in Scotland.
Two per cent of the population are thought to be 'super-recognisers' - those who can easily pick out thousands of faces they have only seen once from a crowd.
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Two per cent of the population are thought to be 'super-recognisers'
Credit: Alamy
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Professor Josh P Davis has worked with more than 30 police forces
Credit: University of Greenwich
Scots cops lag behind other forces by not using talented officers to help identify and catch crooks, an expert warns.
They have previously been drafted in to identify faces in CCTV footage from major events including the 2011 London riots.
Dr David Robertson, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Strathclyde, explained: 'Super-recognisers are people with a naturally high aptitude at learning and recognising faces.
'Across society, we rely on faces for identity recognition purposes in policing, at border control, and even when presenting ID cards to purchase cigarettes and alcohol.
"Despite this, correctly recognising new instances of people we are unfamiliar with - whose faces we have not encountered before - is actually a pretty challenging task and misidentifications do occur.
"Research has shown that it is very difficult to try and train people to be better at this type of face identification, and so the best approach, within psychological science, at present, is to select individuals with a natural aptitude for faces for roles in which accurate recognition is the critical task.
"We also know that the super-recogniser advantage extends to face recognition even from poor quality CCTV, if the individual is disguised."
A leading University of Greenwich academic says Scotland is lagging behind.
Professor Josh P Davis has worked with more than 30 police forces in helping them to identify super-recognisers from their workforce.
He argues those with remarkable face recognition abilities are, in some instances, superior to artificial intelligence.
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It comes months after Scotland's top cop Jo Farrell voiced her support for the use of facial recognition technology to tackle crime.
The Met Police has already trialled live facial recognition, which has been described as the biggest breakthrough for crime detection since DNA.
Professor Davis said: 'When you want to try and identify the perpetrator and you have a database of potential mugshots, that face is fed into a system and it searches through, potentially, a very large database if you're going to put it through the entire police record of everyone who's been arrested.
'It brings up a large array of face potential matches and against each one you'll get some sort of percentage likelihood that it's a match.
'But if that person hasn't been arrested for five to ten years their appearance will have changed. AI is not as good at that point at all.
'It's AI and super-recognisers that work the best together, rather than one or the other.'
A Police Scotland spokesperson said: 'We are in the early stages of working with partners to review the potential advantages of super recognisers.
'Our officers are keen to explore every tactic possible to detect and deter crime and keep people safe.'
To find out if you could be a super-recogniser, take the University of Greenwich test.