Study Says Police Lineups Need To Be Reworked

On popular TV shows many crimes are solved when lineups are brought into the equation however a recent study has found that many innocent people are convicted because of those lineups.

The study published in the American Judicature Society says that police need to update the way they conduct lineups, while Dr Gary Well of Iowa State University notes of his study:

“One of the things we observed over and over again is that witnesses tend to compare one person to another, decide who looks most like the perpetrator and then their propensity is to pick that person. That’s OK if the real perpetrator is in there, but if the real perpetrator is not in there, there’s still someone that looks more like the perpetrator than the others.”

The new research shows that a sequential lineup allows a person to look at each personal individually before moving on to the next person. According to researchers people who look at possible suspects one at a time are less likely to pick a “filler” person from the lineup.

Dr Wells goes on to tell ABC News:

“The sequential procedure reduced these types of mistaken identifications without reducing the frequency of which witnesses pick the suspects.”

Statistical analysis revealed that the sequential method yielded fewer incorrect identification results with only 12.2 percent of suspects improperly identified compared to the standard lineup methodology which left 18.1 percent of suspected misidentified.

Thankfully according to Dr. Wells many police stations around the United States have already began to utilize new police lineup methodologies in their precincts.