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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2020
This article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.
The author wishes to thank Professor Graham Davies for his helpful insights in conversation and for allowing the author sight of an unpublished manuscript in his possession written by Jacques Penry. He also thanks the two anonymous peer reviewers for their detailed and constructive advice.
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29 ‘Minister announces new criminal identification system’, 22 Apr. 1970, WYAS, John Waddington papers, box 69.
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46 For example, ‘This girl should be a woman territorial!’, Daily Mirror, 22 Oct. 1938, p. 15; ‘This girl wants to help Britain!’, Daily Mirror, 27 Oct. 1938, p. 14; ‘These are the best jobs for this man’, Daily Mirror, 5 Nov. 1938, p. 15; ‘A face you couldn't swindle’, Daily Mirror, 8 Dec. 1938, p. 19.
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