Clothing recognition tech nabs armed robber

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has secured the conviction of an armed robber by using enhanced CCTV footage of his crimes.

The proliferation of CCTV cameras in the high street and around commercial buildings has helped the police to detect crime and secure convictions to a greater degree. However, not all of the footage they collect is of a high enough quality to be of use.

This was the case after a spate of armed robberies in the Belfast area, around Newtonabbey, in which the two perpetrators were caught on CCTV cameras. CCTV has been around long enough for criminals to be aware of their presence and take precautions about covering their faces, which is what the two Belfast robbers did.

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However, in one of the robberies, one of the individuals discarded a piece of paper from which the police were able to recover a fingerprint. This was enough to link the suspect to that one robbery but not the other half dozen he was suspected of participating in.

Unable to identify the suspects by their faces, the police identified that the same sets of clothes were worn in each of the robberies. Similar clothes were taken from the suspect's home, after police had established through the fingerprint evidence that he was present in at least one of the robberies. They brought in a team from crime prevention and detection specialist ABM to help them sift through the CCTV footage for further evidence.

ABM's Facial Verification Team was able to identify characteristics on the clothing seen on camera, which established they were the same articles seized from the suspect's home. Such characteristics included labels, writing and stains on the clothing.

Faced with this evidence, the suspect changed his plea from not guilty to guilty to all of the robberies he was charged with and in October this year, he was sentenced at Belfast Crown Court to seven years in custody.

Newtonabbey CID Detective Constable Philip Cummings said: "The clothing evidence was the big thing in this case. This technology definitely helped to swing the defendant over to making a guilty plea."

Cummings explained that in the two cases where he has used enhanced CCTV evidence to build a case, the defendant has changed their plea to guilty without it having to go to court. He can rely on expert witnesses to verify the quality of the evidence if it should go to court, which will be matched by expert witness testimony from the defence. In the instances where the defence has requested the evidence to put before their expert, no actual challenge has been forthcoming, indicating the evidence is indisputable.

Cummings said: "This sort of service will most definitely be used more in the future. Retailers generally don't have CCTV that is up to Home Office standards and we will have to rely on technology that enhances it."