It was bound to happen.
Between municipal cameras, private surveillance videos, professional photographers and camera-phone users, it was virtually inevitable that investigators would isolate images of suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, forensic experts said.
But having the images is just one step in a long investigative process, said Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio and video forensic expert. Real-life crime solving is far different and far more painstaking than prime-time crime shows depict.
Facial recognition software, for example, is hardly as advanced as crime dramas suggest, the experts said. Investigators in Boston likely had to comb through thousands of photos and hours of video to spot the men whose images they released to the public Thursday afternoon.
“ … you don’t just push a button and the picture is compared to a national database of terrorists,” Primeau said. “It’s not nearly what Hollywood paints it to be.”
Or, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a congressional committee Thursday with some asperity: “This is not an ‘NCIS’ episode.”
Thus the FBI turned to the public Thursday in hopes of identifying two men shown in a few seconds of video footage and described as “suspects” in Monday’s attack.
The video was shot by a camera apparently mounted on a building on the same side of the street where two homemade bombs later exploded, killing three and injuring more than 170. It shows two young men wearing baseball caps and carrying dark knapsacks, walking single-file along the sidewalk. One of them is seen setting his knapsack down on the concrete.
Neither man looks directly into the camera; their faces are partially obscured by their caps and seen from above and largely in profile. Authorities did not reveal how close to the time of the blasts the images were captured.
Desptite their limitations, the images give investigators in Boston a huge head-start over their predecessors in earlier bombing cases such as Atlanta or Oklahoma City, experts said.
“All you need is one person to say ‘Yeah I saw him last week here,’ or ‘I know this boy,’ and pretty soon you solved the mystery,” Primeau said, speaking generally rather than to the specifics of the Boston case.
Whether such images actually make their way into a courtroom is a different matter, experts said.
Surveillance evidence is more commonly used in investigations than prosecutions, said Nancy La Vigne, director of The Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center. “It’s one investigative tool in the toolbox,” she said.
Sometimes, the courtroom value of such imagery is limited by what La Vigne called the “CSI effect”: an expectation that real-life law enforcement has the same uber-advanced crime fighting technologies seen on TV.
“Jurors feel like ‘Surely they should have more evidence … they should be able to do this, or that or the other because I saw it on television and it must be true,’” she said. “If only we had the computers and technology to do the stuff they do on TV.”
One area in which technology has undoubtedly progressed is in the quality of imagery. Digital videos give investigators clearer views of facial features than the VHS tapes of yesteryear. And mobile phones have morphed from communication devices to tiny computers, complete with high-definition cameras.
At the same time, social media has given people a fast and fluid way to share information that otherwise would probably have remained private. Almost from the instant of the Boston bombing, countless people took to the Internet to share footage and help pinpoint clues they hoped could help investigators.
But a greater contributor to crime-fighting is the rise in municipal surveillance systems, experts said. Since 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has pumped millions if not more into these systems across the country, La Vigne said.
People were once wary of such surveillance activities, but in a post-9/11 world, resistance has waned, she said.
“I think we are willing to accept it because the trade off is, hopefully, greater safety,” she said.
Like it or not, for now, the technology is all around us. So events like Thursday’s press conference are more or less a foregone conclusion in the wake of big, public crimes, said forensic video analyst David McKay, principal of Blackstone Forensics in Canada.
“I knew there absolutely was video or a photograph of that suspect or suspects somewhere,” he said.
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