Cops turn to sketch artists to 'capture' suspects in Bengaluru

Bengaluru: Artificial intelligence may be revolutionising every field, but the Bengaluru police appear to be wary of adopting it in their investigations, especially while drawing sketches of suspects, citing reliability and accuracy.

Hence, the Central Crime Branch preferred their trusted 35-year-old Bengaluru-based artist to draw the suspect’s portrait in the Rameshwaram Café blast case. 

Speaking exclusively to DH, the artist, preferring anonymity, said he managed to bring out three vivid portraits of the suspect in just three hours. 

In his six-year stint as an artist, he has managed to contribute to over 600 cases, including the high-profile Gauri Lankesh assassination case and a Kashmir terror suspect case.

He also has a reputation for achieving 85% accuracy in his job.

An investigator, part of the CCB’s Organised Crime Wing, underscored that as identification of the suspect is a crucial part of an investigation, they prefer human intervention to piece together various eyewitness accounts to come up with the sketch.

“Sketch artists have largely proven to be successful and are capable of crafting accurate suspect pictures with minimal resources. Whenever we outsourced sketch artists, we have achieved an average accuracy of 80%,” he noted, adding that it is much easier to explain the available leads to a human than running them through technology.

Trusted artists

The department has no artists on its rolls but the investigating officer outsources them based on the need, largely, art school students. A few officers do have their trusted artists.

The artists are paid between Rs 3,000 and Rs 10,000 based on the nature of work, according to the officer.

Every police station has tools to mix-match leads to get a sample picture, but they are not used frequently.

According to the artist who handled the café blast case, imagination and daily observations are key to achieving the best accuracy.

What this means is that artists actively observe things around them, which, in the case of AI, is data. For the police department to shift to AI to do investigations, they need classified, accurate and varied data to achieve the best accuracy.

Challenges in using AI

C Vamsi Krishna, DIGP CID, noted that if the data fed to the AI is not well defined, it can lead to blunders.

He cited examples of proactive policing techniques used in western countries turning out to be racial in nature as a result of the data it was fed.  

“Though many AI tools that help investigations are available, using them blindly could be disastrous as there are barely any tools that are tested and suit Indian conditions,” he noted.

Raman Gupta, additional commissioner, Administration, said they currently lack trained hands to adopt AI in investigations. 

Bengaluru city police commissioner B Dayananda said, “We are being judicious in adopting AI for investigations. It has been long espoused to do analytical work, but in investigations, selective work is being done through AI, as a slight mistake can prove costly in investigations.” 

New technologies

He referred to the traffic department’s operations through AI to underscore the readiness of the police department to adopt new technologies for better policing; however, he acknowledged that adoption of AI for investigations is still in a nascent stage.