Facial recognition software helps pick out the perps

TACOMA – The forgery and theft case had victims, a witness and decent surveillance images from an ATM. What it didn’t have were any leads on who committed the crime. But instead of being tossed aside, as happens in many property crime cases, the ATM images were e-mailed to Steve Wilkins at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.

Wilkins, the department’s forensic services supervisor, picked the clearest image and used new facial recognition software to compare it to 16 years’ worth of prisoner mug shots taken at the Pierce County Jail.

Within 15 minutes he’d found a match.

Detectives followed the lead and eventually arrested Susan Bennett, who was charged in October with 11 crimes in connection with the ATM thefts. She pleaded guilty Dec. 11.

The match was the first for the Sheriff’s Department’s six-month pilot project with Sagem Morpho Inc.’s new facial recognition software, MorphoFace.

The computer program runs with Hollywood-like ease and, with a click of a button, compares a suspect’s image to a database of thousands of known Pierce County offenders.

“It’s really cool,” said Wilkins, who wants to buy the final version of the software when it hits the market in January and add it to his forensic tools.

Detectives and Tacoma-Pierce County Crime Stoppers officials are revisiting unsolved bank robberies, ATM scams and other crimes that have good surveillance images to see whether the program can crack the cases.

Suspect photos from a few criminal cases have been run through the software but didn’t generate any hits.

Nevertheless, officials are optimistic the new software would solve crimes in the long run.

“We are pretty excited about this,” said sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Tim Kobel, who supervises the Property Crimes Unit. “We think it is going to turn some cases for us, and we’ll make some arrests.”

The Sheriff’s Department paid Sagem Morpho Inc., a French biometric technology company whose North American headquarters is in Tacoma, $18,000 to test the software from June through December.

The department is one of two law-enforcement agencies in the country piloting the MorphoFace software, which is on a computer in the Forensic Services Unit in the County-City Building in Tacoma.

Other major law-enforcement agencies in the state, including Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane police departments, don’t use such software.

While facial recognition software has been used to scan for felons and suspected terrorists at major events, the Sheriff’s Department is not using the software to scan crowds. It’s intended to be an investigative tool for detectives, said Eric Hess, Sagem Morpho’s North American product manager for facial recognition and iris recognition.

“This is a tool to help them identify likely suspects,” Hess said. “There is no way to lift a fingerprint off an ATM.”