Police Mugshot Research Articles

Cross-dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography

Abstract This co-authored article draws upon two distinct genres of photography, police mugshots and amateur soldier snapshots, to illustrate the value of queer visual culture methodologies for how to think about the visualization of violence, masculinity and desire. Building upon two vastly different depictions of male to female cross-dressing, one produced between 1934 and 1938 by the Berlin police and Gestapo of a transvestite and the other produced between 1940 and 1944 by cross-dressing Wehrmacht soldiers behind the lines, we argue that in searching for evidence of intact identities, we overlook important ambiguities. We first show how different photographic traditions have framed gender and sexual non-conformity in the historical record and then go deeper into an image analysis. Drawing upon cross-dressing as a polyvalent performance of masculinity, as play, camp and an identity category, we explore how photographic sources help us better appreciate the multiple and sometimes coexisting layers of feminized masculinity at work during the Third Reich. By queering Nazi history and reading the police mugshots and amateur Wehrmacht photographs within and beyond their visual frames, we point out the limits of reducing every image of cross-dressing to an expression of an inchoate gay or trans identity and argue for analysis that embraces the multiple layers of histories gathered around visual sources.

Face Photo Recognition using Sketch Image for Security System

Because of expanding requests in application regions, for example, validation of law requirement, video reconnaissance, banking and access to security frameworks, programmed face acknowledgment has pulled in extraordinary consideration as of late. The acknowledgment of the face has ended up being one of the present essential applications. It is utilized fundamentally for computerized amusement, security and authorization. Face acknowledgment can be for the entire or fractional face, the entire face for the entire face identification and explicit highlights for the incomplete face discovery. The examination in most criminal cases relies upon the portrayals attracted by the observers ' depiction. The programmed recovery of photographs from the police mug-shot database that coordinate this depiction can conceivably diminish the quantity of suspects. Fundamentally, this procedure relies upon the onlooker and precision of the sketch craftsman's memory of the face to catch those subtleties. It can help scientists viably find or diminish potential suspects. By and large, be that as it may, a speculate's photograph picture isn't accessible and the best substitute is frequently a sketch drawing dependent on an observer's memory. We present another photograph recuperation framework utilizing face draws by changing a photograph picture into a sketch, fundamentally lessening the distinction among photograph and sketch, enabling the two to coordinate successfully.

Between film and photography: the bubble of blood in The Family of Disorder

Founded within the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the film company Belair was one of the most radical attempts to cultivate a cinema in the spirit of Tropicalism: its works are distinguished by parodies of genre filmmaking, a carnivalesque celebration of the body, and a profound investment in subversive politics. Led by filmmakers Rogerio Sganzerla and Julio Bressane and actress Helena Ignez, Belair produced 6 films between January and March 1970, when the team was forced into exile. 'A Familia do Barulho' ('The Family of Disorder'), directed by Bressane, contains one of the most striking sequences in all of Belair’s productions. Its portrait of a nuclear family in constant tension ends up with the three main characters looking straight into the camera and suffering in front of an unknown, invisible danger: a young man has a wound on his face; another covers his face with his hands in a liminal state; and a woman, played by Ignez, vomits a bloody slobber. Following Brigitte Peucker’s exploration of the relationship between cinema’s impurity, stillness and the cinematic body, as well as Raymond Bellour’s analysis of some dispositifs that anticipated the movement of cinema from the immobility of death, I will argue that these images exist in a territory between different media, and between life and death: they are intersections of the liberating dynamism of cinema and the enforced stillness of photography, which evokes police mugshots, the menace of firing squads, and the ghostly quality of wax figures. I will focus particularly on the case of Helena Ignez and her bloody mouth, which chime with the tropicalist exploration of the grotesque and the intermedial quality of the cinematic body.

(The Good), The Bad and The Ugly: The Visual Construction of Female Child Sex-offenders

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of female sex offenders. It utilises the case study of Vanessa George, a nursery worker who was involved in the exchange of indecent imagery of children via an online paedophile ring. The first part of the paper considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection photographs and the police mugshot of Vanessa George. The paper considers the ways in which George‟s physical appearance and her suggested ability to deceive were used to visually represent her as “other”, thus reinforcing the existing simplistic motifs of female sex offending.

The FaceSketchID System: Matching Facial Composites to Mugshots

Facial composites are widely used by law enforcement agencies to assist in the identification and apprehension of suspects involved in criminal activities. These composites, generated from witness descriptions, are posted in public places and media with the hope that some viewers will provide tips about the identity of the suspect. This method of identifying suspects is slow, tedious, and may not lead to the timely apprehension of a suspect. Hence, there is a need for a method that can automatically and efficiently match facial composites to large police mugshot databases. Because of this requirement, facial composite recognition is an important topic for biometrics researchers. While substantial progress has been made in nonforensic facial composite (or viewed composite) recognition over the past decade, very little work has been done using operational composites relevant to law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, no facial composite to mugshot matching systems have been documented that are readily deployable as standalone software. Thus, the contributions of this paper include: 1) an exploration of composite recognition use cases involving multiple forms of facial composites; 2) the FaceSketchID System, a scalable, and operationally deployable software system that achieves state-of-the-art matching accuracy on facial composites using two algorithms (holistic and component based); and 3) a study of the effects of training data on algorithm performance. We present experimental results using a large mugshot gallery that is representative of a law enforcement agency’s mugshot database. All results are compared against three state-of-the-art commercial-off-the-shelf face recognition systems.

Do Characteristics of Faces That Convey Trustworthiness and Dominance Underlie Perceptions of Criminality?

BackgroundThis study tested whether the 2D face evaluation model proposed by Oosterhof and Todorov can parsimoniously account for why some faces are perceived as more criminal-looking than others. The 2D model proposes that trust and dominance are spontaneously evaluated from features of faces. These evaluations have adaptive significance from an evolutionary standpoint because they indicate whether someone should be approached or avoided.MethodParticipants rated the emotional state, personality traits, and criminal appearance of faces shown in photographs. The photographs were of males and females taken under naturalistic conditions (i.e., police mugshots) and highly controlled conditions. In the controlled photographs, the emotion display of the actor was systematically varied (happy expression, emotionally neutral expression, or angry expression).ResultsBoth male and female faces rated high in criminal appearance were perceived as less trustworthy and more dominant in police mugshots as well as in photographs taken under highly controlled conditions. Additionally, emotionally neutral faces were deemed as less trustworthy if they were perceived as angry, and more dominant if they were morphologically mature. Systematically varying emotion displays also affected criminality ratings, with angry faces perceived as the most criminal, followed by neutral faces and then happy faces.ConclusionThe 2D model parsimoniously accounts for criminality perceptions. This study extends past research by demonstrating that morphological features that signal high dominance and low trustworthiness can also signal high criminality. Spontaneous evaluations regarding criminal propensity may have adaptive value in that they may help us to avoid someone who is physically threatening. On the other hand, such evaluations could inappropriately influence decision making in criminal identification lineups. Hence, additional research is needed to discover whether and how people can avoid making evaluations regarding criminality from a person’s facial appearance.

Recognizing Rotated Faces From Frontal and Side Views: An Approach Toward Effective Use of Mugshot Databases

Mug shot photography has been used to identify criminals by the police for more than a century. However, the common scenario of face recognition using frontal and side-view mug shots as gallery remains largely uninvestigated in computerized face recognition across pose. This paper presents a novel appearance-based approach using frontal and sideface images to handle pose variations in face recognition, which has great potential in forensic and security applications involving police mugshot databases. Virtual views in different poses are generated in two steps: 1) shape modelling and 2) texture synthesis. In the shape modelling step, a multilevel variation minimization approach is applied to generate personalized 3-D face shapes. In the texture synthesis step, face surface properties are analyzed and virtual views in arbitrary viewing conditions are rendered, taking diffuse and specular reflections into account. Appearance-based face recognition is performed with the augmentation of synthesized virtual views covering possible viewing angles to recognize probe views in arbitrary conditions. The encouraging experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach by using frontal and side-view images is a feasible and effective solution to recognizing rotated faces, which can lead to a better and practical use of existing forensic databases in computerized human face-recognition applications.

Silence is not golden.

Silence is not golden.