University of Greenwich: Two-year deal to train elite police spotters

The German federal Bundespolizei, the police force with the largest number of employees in Europe, has signed a two-year agreement to work with Professor Josh Davis’s internationally renowned team at the university. Their work will continue to identify those with exceptional face-recognition skills.302080

Davis’s lab team will test existing and new officers with the aim of identifying additional super-recognisers to boost those identified in an earlier project. That two-year project saw over 5,000 people tested, which led to more than 100 being identified as super-recognisers – the largest number yet in a single project.

Professor Davis said: “In the past decade the University of Greenwich has become established as an international centre of excellence into research on super-recognisers, or people who possess extraordinarily good face-recognition ability.

“Police super-recognisers who have taken University of Greenwich developed tests, designed to identify police super-recognisers for deployment to specialist roles, have since made well over 10,000 identifications of suspects, mainly from CCTV. More than 200 private sector super-recogniser jobs have also been created.”

On Thursday 20 October a delegation from the Bundespolizei, visited Greenwich to sign a new two-year contract.

This research programme has been led by Josh P Davis (Professor of Applied Psychology, School of Human Sciences) of the Face and Voice Recognition Lab, under the auspices of the Institute of Lifecourse Development at the university. More than 25 research consultancy contracts have been signed with different international police forces and businesses.