Police Sketches

Hey, it’s Zack. Before we get started, I just want to let you know that we mention some sensitive issues in this episode. If you’re listening with younger kids, you might want to review it first. Alright, on with the show.

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When it comes to identifying criminals, today’s police departments have all kinds of fancy tools at their disposal — from high-definition security cameras, to facial recognition software. But, when all else fails, investigators fall back on something much simpler: pen, paper, and the human eye.

GIBSON: They will only use you on the very worst cases, when they throw their arms up and go, “Oh no! What are we going to do? We got nothing!” Then they call the artist.

That’s Lois Gibson. She worked with the Houston Police Department for nearly 40 years as a full-time forensic artist.

GIBSON: I’m someone you can talk to if you’re all freaked out and you’ve seen a murder. 

At some point, you’ve probably seen a police sketch in the news, or on social media. It’s a drawing of a suspect based entirely on the memory of a witness.

GIBSON: You’re drawing somebody you can’t see. And you got to be real strong. If you go in with somebody that’s had loved ones killed in front of them, you got to to be able to take it. I take the feelings of anger and sadness, and I have it come out in my hand in a drawing. You can do a dumpy, crummy sketch. If it catches the person, it’s perfect.

But just how reliable are those drawings? As video footage becomes more common, police departments have become more selective about using hand-drawn portraits.

SARNI: Once that’s put out there, we have to live with that sketch, positive or negatively. If that sketch doesn’t look like the person, we’ve got a problem. 

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: police sketches.

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For many decades, eyewitness accounts were all detectives had to go on to solve cases. After a crime, detectives would show witnesses photos of noses or eyes to help them communicate what a suspect looked like. Eventually, artists were brought in to sketch composites of these recollections. In today’s newfangled era of technology, the people responsible for solving crimes say there’s still a need for the human touch.

SARNI: It’s not a bad tool to utilize when there is no video available and the victim had a real good look at the person that did it.

David Sarni is an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Before that, he was with the NYPD for 28 years, as an officer and then a detective. He worked narcotics and burglary cases in Manhattan.

SARNI: For a robbery investigation, we bring the victim in, we would do a crime scene walkthrough. We would try to go through the areas that they were at, and, “As I’m talking to you, do you remember anything particular about the person?” Usually the interaction with the victim and the perpetrator were face-to-face. So if they could actually describe something unusual about that person’s features, I would then suggest we go to speak to the sketch artist.

Detectives use forensic art in a few different ways. There are age progressions, where an artist visualizes what a suspect or missing person might look like after time has passed. And there are postmortem reconstructions, which involve putting a face to a decomposed body or skeletal remains. But the variety that you’re probably most familiar with is the composite sketch. That’s when an artist produces a drawing of a suspect’s face based on witness memory. At many police departments, these sketches are performed as supplemental work by a patrol officer or detective on staff. But Sarni says that even the NYPD — which is America’s largest police force — only has a few people assigned to the task.

SARNI: We’re very limited in the resources we have for it. We only have usually two to three people that do it in a police department with cases in the tens of thousands. It takes time to do a forensic sketch, upwards of maybe two, three hours. It’s not like a Times Square, 15-seconds caricature.

Few people know this better than Lois Gibson. She started her career as a forensic artist after enduring a trauma of her own. While working as a dancer in Los Angeles in the 1970s, a serial rapist broke into her apartment and attacked her.

GIBSON: This violent felon tried to kill me for, like, what would have been a recreational activity for him. And I took it real bad and I stuffed it down. I was completely destroyed. I decided to leave L.A. So I picked out Texas on a map with my eyes closed. No job, no friends, just packed a car and drove to it.

In Texas, Gibson got a fine arts degree, took a forensic art course, and eventually got a certificate from the International Association for Identification — the certification body for forensic artists. In 1989, she was hired as a full-time forensic artist with the Houston Police Department. She stayed there for more than three decades, and worked on more than 1,300 police sketches that eventually led to arrests.

GIBSON: I did 383 in one year. And then one day, I did six murder cases, all different.

For Gibson, a job started with a call from a detective. She’d pack her easel and drawing materials in the car and drive to meet the witness — sometimes at a police substation, other times at a hospital, or at their home. When she met the witness, her first goal was to lighten the mood.

GIBSON: It’s about handling witnesses who have been through the worst thing in their life. So, you have to be a wonderful person to talk to. You have complete empathy. What do they want to talk about — their doggy, their kitty, their kids, their mom, whatever. First you find out the basics. Male, female, height, weight, Black, White, Mexican, Chinese, chubby, skinny, muscular.

And then, they hand the witness a copy of a book that contains more than 1,200 pictures of different face shapes, hairstyles, mouths, noses, and ears.

GIBSON: There’s a book called the Samantha Steinberg Facial Identification Catalog. Everybody in the world uses that. There’s like about 200 eyes, lips, noses, of each feature. Then you draw the features they choose and say, “I’ll change anything you want.” And then you do that, and then you’re done.

Once the sketch is complete, the artist will flip around the easel and show it to the witness. And it often evokes a strong reaction.

GIBSON: I’ve had someone throw up. I’ve had people shout “no!” I had a girl, it was a quadruple homicide and she took both of my shoulders and she slammed her head into my chest really hard, and she went, “Yes!” And then I had an officer that was shot three times, run over and drug under the car by the shooter. So I went to the hospital three days later. I did a sketch and I held it over him on his hospital bed. He’s all wrapped in bandages. And he just took his finger up and touched it.

The Holy Grail for police is when the victim remembers something unusual about the suspect.

GIBSON: The most important feature will be like a strange hairdo. They’ll always remember that. But my favorite grooming activity by felons is getting tattoos on their faces. Please keep it up: get that tattoo on that face — I love it!

But more often than not, there isn’t really anything that makes the suspect stand out.

GIBSON: I’ve done hundreds that are just boring looking people. And that’s a sign of a really good forensic artist — if you can do a real boring person.

A full-time forensic artist might earn anywhere $35,000 to $60,000 a year with a state or local police department, and can clear more than $100,000 with a federal agency like the FBI. Some artists choose to freelance, and might charge a flat fee of $200 or more per sketch. Gibson mostly retired in 2021, but she still takes on the occasional gig and, as one of the most respected artists in the field, she commands a premium.

GIBSON: I charge $500 if I work a homicide for a county. When I started, I was charging $35 an hour in the 80s, because that’s what my redneck plumber husband got, but you can charge what you want. I would do it for free. You want to call me and get it free? You got a baby kidnapping? I don’t want to talk about money.

Some police departments have switched from using hand-drawn sketches to using computer programs, like EvoFit. The software creates a composite from a series of randomly generated faces selected by a witness, rather than individual features. But Sarni says it’s often more cost-effective to just hire an artist with an easel.

SARNI: You have so many different types of programs out there, and every program has to be vetted, obviously. Police agencies have to pay a licensing fee, so sometimes it’s cheaper just to go the hand-to-hand writing route.

And computer-powered police sketches come with another problem: they’re too precise.

GIBSON: The thing about computers, they come out with a picture that looks like a photograph. Big mistake! People think it needs to look exactly like the person — and then they never call in a tip because you’re not going to have anybody that looks exactly. But a drawing screams, “Not exact! Approximation!”

Either way, for a detective trying to solve a crime, a composite isn’t definitive evidence. But in the right hands, it can be the start of a promising investigation.

SARNI: We’re going to get a sketch, but that sketch is not the be all, end all because we have to determine whether or not that person who’s in the sketch is the person who committed the crime. 

That’s coming up.

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Once a police sketch is done, a detective like David Sarni will typically share it internally first, to see if it resembles anyone in the department’s database of prior offenders. And then it goes out to the general public, via social media and news stations.

SARNI: Detectives solve cases, but the public is involved too. You know, I’ve seen this happen more often than not that we get calls — ‘Yeah, I saw this person in the street. This is the guy you’re looking for.’ 

But a sketch isn’t enough evidence to arrest a look-alike for a crime.

SARNI: We just can’t go, “Oh, we have a sketch, that’s absolutely him.” Sometimes, you know, recollection is off. And we want to make sure we’re arresting the person who committed the crime. We’re not looking to make arrests just to make the arrest.

CROCKETT: So, if you had a police sketch of someone and you were just driving down the street and you saw a guy that looked exactly like the police sketch, would you have any ability to sort of go over and —

SARNI: You can watch, do an observation, you can stop, talk to him, get some info, maybe just a general conversation. It’s not just grabbing people because they look like somebody.

The police often narrow their investigation down to a handful of suspects and photograph them in a lineup. The witness reviews the photos and tries to identify the culprit. But sketches, and photo lineups, can present risks when a case goes to trial — particularly if video footage surfaces later on that shows a culprit who looks different.

SARNI: We don’t want to have a video conflict with a sketch.

When a criminal case goes to trial in the state of New York, the prosecution is required to share any prior statements made by a witness who is testifying, with the defense team. That includes any police sketches that the witness helped produce.

SARNI: And that’s something that will have to be talked about at trial. Maybe the victim will have to testify as to why the differences in the appearance of the perpetrator as opposed to the sketch. If that person doesn’t look like the subject, that could be problematic.

Sometimes, video evidence comes to light after a sketch is already done. The video might unmistakably identify a suspect — but if the sketch is off, it could hurt the prosecution’s case.

SARNI: For the defense, it’s a great tool for them to, during cross-examination of the victim, go after them for the lack of recollection, for their poor memory.

Sarni says this is part of a broader problem with police sketches: they’re only as good as a witness’s memory. Research has shown that we’re pretty bad at remembering faces. Our brains struggle to identify individual features like a nose or mouth, the way that police sketches are often assembled. We also struggle to describe these features. Sarni experienced this firsthand during his time with the NYPD.

SARNI: We had a victim who was burglarized. She actually saw the perpetrator. I said, “The first thing is, can you identify the person involved in this? And she said, yes. So we bring her to the sketch artist. When he would show the eyes, she would say, “No, they’re bigger,” and, “No, bigger. Bigger!” And the sketch artist, he’s like, “Man, I just have to tell you this, any bigger, this is gonna look like an alien.” But that’s what she remembered! Her identification process was not going to be beneficial for this investigation. We had to put the sketch out because it’s now part of the case. 

But Sarni says there were also plenty of cases he worked on where a police sketch played a pivotal role in finding a suspect.

SARNI: Did I make arrests based on every sketch I did? No, but I did have positive results on at least three.

Lois Gibson, the artist, says that her sketches were a lot more fruitful than that.

GIBSON: From a four-year-old, I got a perfect sketch — it caught the guy. He saw a man come in and slash his parents to death, and he gave me a successful sketch. I have witnesses that couldn’t talk. Their throats were cut and I got a sketch that caught the guy. It looked like he posed for it.

Gibson says her success rate across thousands of sketches with the Houston Police Department was around 30 percent. That is, 3 out of every 10 sketches she did eventually led to an arrest. That’s close to the results for the field as a whole: A 2021 study reviewed 508 sketches by 7 forensic artists and found that, overall, sketches helped identify a suspect in 31 percent of cases.

But that doesn’t mean the right person is always arrested. Nearly 70 percent of all wrongful convictions in the U.S. that were later overturned by DNA evidence can be attributed to mistaken eyewitness identifications. In one case, a man served 14 years behind bars for a rape he didn’t commit. He had been arrested because he looked like a police sketch, and the victim had subsequently mistaken him for the perpetrator in a lineup.

Gibson says the artist isn’t to blame in these situations.

GIBSON: Many times somebody called in the wrong person that looked just like the sketch. So, wrongful convictions, I wish there were none but that’s nothing to do with a forensic artist.

The sketch is just a lead. It’s the detectives and — ultimately, says David Sarni — the courts that have to assess culpability.

SARNI: We are only part of the entire criminal justice process. I always call the cops the tip of the spear. We start this stuff. The prosecutor is the one that has to weigh out the evidence and determine, yes, it’s prosecutable. 

But when an artist like Lois Gibson produces an accurate sketch that leads to the right person, everyone has to tip their cap. Sometimes, even the suspect.

GIBSON: There was this one guy right after September 11th, 2001, he stole an airplane. Ooh, he was drunk. He steals an airplane and he flies off and runs into some wires and the airplane drops and some people see him walking out of the woods. Did a sketch. And immediately, it was found out that he worked there. He was caught. I got a letter from him. He was sweet. He says, ‘That’s no fair that you draw pictures of people. You should not do that.” Can’t make this stuff up — can’t.

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

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This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

GIBSON: They would tell me for years I couldn’t get a job because it’s not in the budget. Wrong!