98. Police Sketches

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things - Episode 98: Police Sketches

Release Date: July 7, 2025
Host: Zachary Crockett
Produced by Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

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Introduction to Police Sketches

In this episode of The Economics of Everyday Things, host Zachary Crockett delves into the intriguing world of police sketches—hand-drawn portraits used to identify suspects based on eyewitness accounts. Despite the advent of advanced technologies like high-definition cameras and facial recognition software, traditional sketch artistry remains a crucial tool in criminal investigations.

The Role and Process of Forensic Artists

Lois Gibson, a veteran forensic artist with nearly 40 years at the Houston Police Department, provides an insider’s perspective on the painstaking process of creating accurate sketches from witness memories.

[02:10] Lois Gibson: "You're drawing somebody you can't see and you gotta be real strong. If you go in with somebody that's had loved ones killed in front of them, you, you gotta be able to take it."

Gibson explains that the process begins with meeting the witness in various settings—police stations, hospitals, or homes—and establishing rapport to ease the witness's distress. Utilizing the Samantha Steinberg Facial Identification Catalog, which contains over 1,200 facial features, the witness selects attributes that resemble the suspect, allowing Gibson to craft a composite image.

[07:35] Lois 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."

Challenges and Reliability of Sketches

Despite their utility, sketches are inherently reliant on the accuracy of human memory, which research shows is often flawed, especially concerning facial features.

David Sarni, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former NYPD detective, highlights these limitations:

[17:07] Zachary Crockett: "Research has shown that we're pretty bad at remembering faces. Our brains struggle to identify individual features like a nose or mouth."

Sarni recounts a case where inconsistent witness descriptions led to an ineffective sketch, emphasizing that while sketches can initiate investigations, they are not definitive evidence for arrests.

Technology vs. Traditional Sketching

With the rise of software like EvoFit, which generates composites from randomly selected facial features, some police departments are shifting away from hand-drawn sketches. However, Sarni points out that these programs can be cost-prohibitive and may produce overly precise images that lack the nuanced, non-exact resemblance necessary for effective identification.

[10:43] Lois 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."

Ultimately, many departments find it more economical and practical to employ traditional forensic artists despite the availability of digital alternatives.

Impact on Investigations and Legal Proceedings

Police sketches serve as pivotal tools in both investigations and legal cases. Once completed, sketches are cross-referenced with internal databases and disseminated to the public through media channels to garner tips and leads.

[15:01] David 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."

However, the reliance on sketches introduces risks, particularly when subsequent evidence like video footage contradicts the initial depiction. In New York, prosecution must disclose all prior statements and sketches to the defense, potentially undermining the case if discrepancies arise.

[16:09] David Sarni: "We don't want to have a video conflict with a sketch."

Success Rates and Risks of Error

The effectiveness of police sketches varies. Gibson cites a success rate of approximately 30%, aligning with a 2021 study that found sketches aided in suspect identification in 31% of cases. Nevertheless, the potential for wrongful convictions due to mistaken identifications remains significant.

[18:20] Zachary Crockett: "A 2021 study reviewed 508 sketches by seven forensic artists and found that overall, sketches helped identify a suspect in 31% of cases."

One poignant example involves a man wrongfully convicted of rape based solely on a sketch resemblance, underscoring the high stakes of this method.

[19:48] Lois 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."

Personal Stories and Cases

Gibson shares personal anecdotes illustrating both the triumphs and challenges of forensic sketch artistry. From high-profile cases like the immediate identification of a suspect post-September 11, 2001, to the emotional toll of interacting with victims who depend on her work for closure, Gibson’s experiences highlight the human element behind the sketches.

[20:21] David Sarni: "The prosecutor's the one that has to weigh out the evidence and determine, yes."

Conclusion

Police sketches remain a blend of art and science, offering critical assistance in criminal investigations when used judiciously. While technology provides new avenues for suspect identification, the nuanced skill of forensic artists like Lois Gibson continues to play an indispensable role in the criminal justice system. As Sarni emphasizes, sketches are merely starting points that require thorough investigation to ensure justice is accurately served.

[20:34] Lois Gibson: "It looked like he posed for it. 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."

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This episode was produced by Zachary Crockett and Sarah Lilly, mixed by Jeremy Johnston, with assistance from Daniel Moritz Rabison.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

Hey, it's Zach. Before we get started, just want to let you know that we mentioned some sensitive issues in this episode. If you're listening with younger kids, you might want to review it first. All right, on with the show. 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.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lois Gibson]

I'm someone you can talk to. If you're all freaked out and you've seen a murder.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Lois Gibson]

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

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[David Sarni]

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

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, police sketches. For many decades, eyewitness accounts where 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.

[David 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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 in narcotics and burglary cases in Manhattan.

[David Sarni]

For a robbery investigation, we'd bring the victim in. We would do a crime scene walkthrough. We'd 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

Detectives use forensic art in a few different ways. There are age progressions where an artist visualizes what a suspect or a 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 a detective on staff. But Sarny says that even the nypd, which is America's largest police force, only has a few people assigned to the task.

[David 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, and it takes time to do a forensic sketch, upwards of maybe two, three hours. It's not like Times Square, 15 seconds. Caricature.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Lois 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 la. So I picked out Texas on a map with my eyes closed. No job, no friends. Just packed the car and drove to it.

[Zachary Crockett]

In Texas, Gibson got a fine arts degree and took some forensic art courses. And eventually she got a certificate from the International association for Identification. That's 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.

[Lois Gibson]

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

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

And then they hand the witness a copy of a book that contains more than 1200 pictures of different face shapes, hairstyles, mouths, noses, and ears.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lois 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. She went, yes. And then I had an officer that was shot three times, run over and drug under a car by the shooter. So I went to the hospital. Three days later, I did a sketch. 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

The holy grail for police is when the victim remembers something unusual about the suspect.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

A full time forensic artist might earn anywhere from 35,000 to $60,000 a year with the state or local police department, and they 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.

[Lois 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? Got a baby kidnapping? I don't want to talk about money.

[Zachary Crockett]

Some police departments have switched from 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 Sarny says it's often more cost effective to just hire an artist with an easel.

[David 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 handwriting route.

[Zachary Crockett]

And computer powered police sketches come with another problem. They're too precise.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[David Sarni]

We can 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'd committed the crime.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's coming up.

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[David 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

But a sketch isn't enough evidence to arrest a lookalike for a crime.

[David 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.

[Zachary 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.

[David Sarni]

You can watch and do an observation. You could stop, you could talk to him, get some information, maybe just a general conversation. It's not just grabbing people because they look like somebody.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[David Sarni]

We don't want to have a video conflict with a sketch.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[David 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[David 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[David Sarni]

We had a victim who was burglarized. She actually saw the perpetrator. I said, and the first thing is, can you identify the person involved in this? And she said, yes. So we bring her to the sketch artist. We'd show the eyes. She would say, no, they're bigger, and no, bigger, bigger. And the sketch artist was like, man, I just have to tell you this. Any bigger, this can look like an alien. But that's what she remembered. Her identification process was not gonna be beneficial for this investigation. We had to put the sketch out' cause it's now part of the case.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[David Sarni]

Did I make arrests based on every sketch I did? No. But I did have positive results on at least three.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lois Gibson]

That 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

Gibson says her success rate across thousands of sketches with the Houston Police department was around 30%. That is three 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 seven forensic artists and found that overall, sketches helped identify a suspect in 31% of cases. But that doesn't mean that the right person is always arrested. Nearly 70% of all wrongful convictions in the US 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 the lineup. Gibson says the artist isn't to blame in these situations.

[Lois 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[David Sarni]

We were only part of the entire criminal justice process. I always call cops at the tip of the spear. We start this stuff. The prosecutor's the one that has to weigh out the evidence and determine, yes.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Lois Gibson]

There was this one guy right after September 11, 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 he 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rabison.

[Lois Gibson]

They would tell me for years I couldn't get a job because it's not in the budget. Wrong. The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side.

[Zachary Crockett]

Of Everything Stitcher.

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[David Sarni]

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