Between pencils and genetic markers: Rethinking innovation in policing through forensic face-making technologies
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557231173213 |
| Author | Roos Hopman,Ryanne Bleumink |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Technology in Policing |
Between pencils and genetic markers:
Rethinking innovation in policing through
forensic face-making technologies
Roos Hopman
Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany
Ryanne Bleumink
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
In this article we take two forensic technologies used to generate facial renditions of suspects, forensic DNA phenotyping
(FDP) and facial composite drawing, to think through innovation in policing. Comparing more mundane, taken-for-granted
approaches of facial composite drawing with ‘high-tech’facial renditions generated using DNA traces, we complicate the
value of technological innovation in the criminal investigation. Drawing on participant observations conducted with the
Dutch police, forensic genetic laboratories and interviews with investigators and geneticists, we detail some of the tech-
nicalities behind the making of faces using these technologies, and show the differences in how the technologies are per-
ceived and applied in policing. With our comparison, we show that although facial composite drawing is often quickly
dismissed as being subjective and unreliable, the practice holds important lessons for FDP, in particular FDP’s promise
of producing a photographic likeness of a suspect. With that, we demonstrate that besides introducing ‘new’things, innov-
ation may also be located in more mundane and taken-for-granted technologies such as facial composite drawing. We
conclude by suggesting that police and technology developers alike take existing technologies and practices more ser-
iously, redirecting the focus of innovation towards the affordances of the mundane.
Keywords
Innovation, policing, ethnography, FDP, facial composite drawing, science and technology studies
Submitted 17 Mar 2023, Revise received 19 Dec 2022, accepted 17 Apr 2023
Introduction: What’snew?
In this article, we aim to complicate the high currency of
‘innovation’, especially in terms of technological novelty,
in policing. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork with the
Dutch police, ‘What’snew?’was a question with which
the second author was often confronted. She received
emails promoting lectures about technological innovations,
came across policy documents that urged the need for the
police to innovate, attended meetings at which insights into
novel technologies were shared, observed a range of pilot
studies to research these technologies in practice, and often
overheard chatter about new tech at the coffee machine. In
other words, innovations, in particular technological ones,
were a key point of discussion in and around the police
station. The ‘new’here, she noticed, was closely tied to the
expectation of making the work of the police better, in the
sense of more accurate, and more cost and time efficient.
Corresponding author:
Roos Hopman, Humboldt University Berlin, Department of European
Ethnology, Mohrenstraße 40–41, Berlin, 10117, Germany.
Email: hopmanro@hu-berlin.de
Special Issue: Technology in Policing
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2023, Vol. 25(3) 280–296
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14613557231173213
journals.sagepub.com/home/psm
As stressed in a report published by the Dutch Police
Academy in 2021, technologies are developing at ‘enor-
mous speeds’, with the societal relevance of technological
innovation ever increasing (Ter Veen and Kop, 2021).
Indeed, this document opens by stating that contemporary
societies are heading towards no less than a ‘fourth revolu-
tion’(Schwab, 2016) in which technologies will play an
ever more important role in governance, economy and
industry. To keep up with these developments, and adapt
police work to ‘a changing world’, the report stresses the
need to bring ‘new’,‘advanced’technologies to policing.
It also notes that police organizations have increasingly
been experimenting with introducing new tech in recent
years, with ‘new’, referring to technologies such as compu-
ters and software, smart appliances, DNA analyses and
unmanned drones.
As these excerpts from fieldwork and documents suggest,
technological innovation, implying the optimization and accel-
eration of police practice, is a high priority within police orga-
nizations.
1
This innovation is sought after in all aspects of
policing, whether that be the application of artificial intelli-
gence in handling incoming charges, the digitization of oper-
ational processes or the use of body-worn cameras (Ter Veen
and Kop, 2021). In this article, however, we focus our atten-
tion on the criminal investigation in particular. When it
comes to innovation in investigatory practices, it is the imple-
mentation of novel DNA technologies that play a key role.
DNA analyses are posited as promising a ‘goldmine’
(Meulenbroek and Aben, 2021) of leads, and as such are pre-
sented as contributing to the envisioned increase in effective-
ness. It is no surprise, then, that a whole separate report
published by the Dutch Police Academy was dedicated to
the ‘future of DNA analyses’
2
in the forensic investigation.
In this article, we examine one such innovation for
investigations in particular, namely the prediction of phys-
ical characteristics from DNA traces, or forensic DNA phe-
notyping (hereafter FDP). This focus stems from the wider
context in which the research informing this article was
conducted: both authors worked as part of a broader
social scientific project that studied the surfacing of race
in forensic identification technologies. As part of this
project, the authors each studied a different face-making
technology: the first author (hereafter Roos) looked at
FDP, whereas the second author (hereafter Ryanne)
focusedonfacialcomposite drawing.
During our research, we noticed that when our interlocu-
tors, both technology developers and police, argued for the
utility and forensic relevance of phenotyping services, they
often compared it with the established practice of facial
composite drawing. In particular, FDP was seen as promis-
ing increased precision and detail in facial depictions of sus-
pects, offering more reliable descriptions, hence resulting
in a more efficient investigation. Composite drawing, by
contrast, was often quickly dismissed as subjective and
unreliable, and therefore as being of little value to an inves-
tigation. This is reflected in academic reports and the litera-
ture as well: eyewitness-informed approaches to facial
composites are portrayed by geneticists in particular as
‘notoriously unreliable’(Phillips, 2015; see also Kayser,
2015) and as ‘lacking accuracy’(Maroñas et al., 2014)
due to ‘limitations of human vision and memory’(US
National Research Council, 2014). As such, this face-
making technology is attributed less value by researchers,
technology developers and police alike.
Taking this promise of precision into account, here we
use the forensic products offered by Parabon NanoLabs
(hereafter Parabon) as an example, because they are marketed
by tapping into the discourse on optimization and precision
outlined above. A commercial provider based in the United
States, Parabon offers their ‘Snapshot’product, a service
aimed at predicting facial composites from crime scene
traces. Snapshot is presented as a ‘cutting-edge forensic
DNA analysis service’, providing a photographic image of
an unknown suspect. As professed by Parabon: ‘Solve Your
Toughest Cases —FAST!’. Because of their high level of
detail, the digital faces obtained using this service are argued
to produce leads through which cases can be solved faster
and more efficiently, and as such are presented as optimizing
investigatory work. Although Parabon’s products have been
scrutinized for their ‘overly optimistic promises’(Wienroth,
2020) regarding the prediction of appearance from DNA
traces, they serve as a good example of the progressive narra-
tive surrounding FDP technologies.
In the following, we take the two face-making technolo-
gies introduced above, one considered high-tech and
state-of-the-art, the other more established and mundane,
to complicate innovation as technological novelty. Using
our fieldwork we show that innovation is not necessarily
a process of linear progress, but can also be more contingent
and heterogeneous, involving mundane sociotechnical
work and at times the re-introduction of techniques previ-
ously deemed redundant. Shifting the focus back and
forth between these technologies, we problematize the
idea that innovation has to mean looking ahead and introdu-
cing things that are ‘new’.
In our comparison of the two technologies, we build
on participant observations conducted with the Dutch
police and in two (forensic) genetic laboratories in the
Netherlands. Between November 2018 and May 2019,
Roos was a participant observer for two to four days a
week in two labs, one focused on the development of
FDP technologies and the other geared more towards the
forensic application of DNA analyses. In addition, she
attended international conferences where new forensic
genetic technologies were presented and discussed, and
interviewed two police officers in charge of informing
Hopman and Bleumink 281
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