Super recogniser says first client was man worried wife was in porn

Businessman who wanted to find out if his fiancée had been in a porn film was one of the first non-police clients of ex-Scotland Yard boss who created Britain’s first ‘super recognisers’

  • Mick Neville set up a team of super recognisers while he was at Scotland Yard
  • He has now set up a 40-strong team available for hire in the private sector 
  • Early assignment was looking through porn films for an Indian businessman 

Former Scotland Yard officer Mick Neville (seen in an undated photo) has now moved into the private sector

The police chief who created the UK’s first unit of ‘super recognisers’ has admitted one of his first private customers was an Indian businessman who wanted to find out if his fiancée had appeared in a porn film.

Former Scotland Yard officer Mick Neville was inspired to set up a team of officers with a unique ability to recognise faces during the London riots, but is now in the private sector with a 40-strong team available for hire.

The team’s unusual assignment involved trawling through 1990s ‘Asian Babes’ videos to see if the worried partner’s suspicions were correct, admittedly a change from their usual work of identifying suspects for police forces and governments.

‘So we had to watch these films and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, is it her? Luckily for her, she did not feature,’ Mr Neville told The Telegraph.

The team also received a commission from an American conspiracy theorist who was convinced the Roman Catholic Church had hired an actor to pose as a nun who saw a series of apocalyptic visions in 1917.

Super recognisers are thought to comprise around 1 percent of the population, and can identify at least 80 per cent of faces they’ve seen. 

Petrov (right) was seen grinning in Salisbury on the day police believe the men smeared Novichok on Mr Skripal's front door

Breakthroughs achieved by super recognisers include helping to identify the Salisbury poisoning suspects from CCTV footage of them walking around the city (seen on this grab from March 4, 2018)  

Mr Neville screens applicants by putting them through a series of memory tests developed by academics at Greenwich University.

Recruits include everyone from a session drummer and photographer to a former teacher.

Who are the Met’s super recognisers? 

The super recognisers team was first created in the aftermath of the 2011 riots, as certain officers showed an ability to spot suspects from different pieces of footage.

They have an uncanny ability to recognise faces, remembering people they have not seen for decades, who have substantially changed in appearance, and who they have only fleetingly encountered.

Super recognisers might assist with the matching of faces captured on CCTV footage, the comparison of faces to identification documents, or the scanning of crowds for known troublemakers, wanted perpetrators or even missing persons.

They may also help with victim identification, or deciding whether a person moving between borders is using a fraudulent identity or is even a missing child.

Popular tests assess participants’ ability to recognise photographs of celebrities that were taken a long time before they became famous.

The programme Mr Neville set up at the Met was quickly an astonishing success, with the team of officers identifying 100 suspects a week from often grainy CCTV footage.

He now works with several police forces in a private capacity, with his staff looking through many hours of CCTV to see if they can recognise anyone from an existing list of suspects.

It comes amid controversy over Scotland Yard’s increasing use of facial recognition technology, which will see cameras trained on Christmas shoppers for the first time.

A mobile deployment of the controversial surveillance software will include covering areas in the vicinity of Soho, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and will be used ‘overtly’, the Met said, with a uniformed presence and information leaflets available to the public.

Met Police said the test would run for around eight hours on each day, and all faces on the database used during the deployment are people wanted by police and the courts. However, privacy campaigners labelled the programme ‘authoritarian’.

Mr Neville said the technology was not perfect and still required humans with facial recognition skills to make the final link between a CCTV grab and a suspect.  

Paul Hyland, a Met super recogniser, scans CCTV footage in this photo taken in September 2013

Paul Hyland, a Met super recogniser, scans CCTV footage in this photo taken in September 2013

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