How did this computer-generated drawing go awry? A sketch artist explains.

Unless you just so happen to reside in southeastern England, you probably don’t think too much about what the police in Kent are up to—not to mention the rozzers assigned to the humble town of Royal Tunbridge Wells. Using a system known as Electronic Facial Identification Technique, or E-FIT for short, the Kent police mocked up a computer-generated composite of the suspect’s identifying features, which, uh, came out looking Investigators have released a computer generated image of a man they would like to identify in connection with a burglary in Tunbridge Wells. But as the Kent E-FIT debacle reminds us, such pencil pushers still have a lot to teach our modern-day crime stoppers, and even the fanciest image model can’t beat a trained sketch artist just yet. To get an expert’s evaluation of the Kent computer image and a lesson in what really goes into an effective drawing of a suspect, I called up Carrie Stuart Parks, an FBI-trained forensic sketch artist with decades of experience who now runs the Idaho-based Stuart Parks Forensic Associates firm with her husband, which she described to me as “the largest instructor of forensic art in the world.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. They said, “We think we finally have a successful identification.” And I thought, “Do you realize what the identification rate is with that program?” In a perfect world, we would love to be able to sit down and tweak here and twiddle there and doodle, doodle, doodle, and spit out this incredible photographic image of what the guy looks like and it’s perfect and it’s wonderful.