Madeleine McCann: Team of 'super-recognizers' can track down missing girl using holiday photos, says ex-cop
A former police officer has claimed that his team of facial "super-recognizers" can find Madeleine McCann and that he has offered his services to her grieving parents.
Mick Neville, formerly a chief inspector who founded the Metropolitan Police's Central Forensic Image Team in 2012, said he is now running Super Recognizers International, whose members can recognize up to 80 percent of the faces they see.
Speaking to the Daily Star, Neville said this ability allows them to pore through CCTV footage and pictures to identify criminals and missing people. And while most other forms of investigation have been exhausted in the search for Madeleine, he said he believes she can be found by using his recruits.
Madeleine disappeared on the evening of May 3, 2007, from her parents' room at a resort in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve region of Portugal, and in the 12 years since, her case has become the most heavily-reported missing person case in modern history.
Despite the millions of dollars that have been spent on her search, her whereabouts remain unknown.
Neville, however, said his team can help provide a breakthrough. He said that new suspects could be identified by analyzing her pictures from the family's holiday and cross-checking them against police sketches.
When asked if they could do the same by going through police drawings, he admitted it was possible but that it would not be as accurate. "Up to a point, but you’re always translating what somebody’s told you," he said, adding that if new pictures were released, his team could recognize potential lurkers in the background.
He had previously said that Madeleine could be found by using Facebook's facial recognition technology and passing images on to his super-recognizers. "In my view, if you’re alive today it’s very difficult not to have your image somewhere," he explained. "You’d probably have a passport or you might be captured on social media."
"We could ask Facebook to do a facial recognition search against every missing girl," he continued. "Even if you don’t want to be caught on Facebook you might get caught in somebody else’s selfie."
He explained that the social media giant identifies peoples' features in newly-uploaded photos and recognizes individuals even when they're not tagged in them.
Neville also pointed out that his team had a good track record in assisting the police and used the example of the London riots in 2011, where only one criminal was initially identified after more than 200,000 hours of CCTV footage were analysed by facial recognition software.
When the same footage was given to his Central Forensic Image Team, more than 609 were spotted, with one officer, Gary Collins, identifying 180 just by himself.
In 2016, his team caught a thief who had gone on a stealing spree in south London from 2013-2015 by tracking a logo on his T-shirt. They used the Forensic Image Linking system to identify suspects with a similar appearance and pinpointed his T-shirt with an Everest logo to zero in on Richard Shelley.
Neville revealed he has offered his service to the Find Madeleine campaign twice and detailed what his super-recognizers are capable of achieving, but added that that was 18 months ago and he hasn't heard from them.