Cop Who Never Forgets a Face Has Recognized Over 850 Criminals in the Last Four Years

Inspector Gareth Morris, Pope’s chief officer, remembers that only two days after joining the West Midlands Police, “memory cop” came to him with a photo saying he knew who the robbery suspect was. “I told him I would struggle to pick out my own mother in a picture like that. One and a half hours later Andy had stopped the guy in the city centre and the suspect had admitted being present at the scene.” But he was only getting started. In the last four years, PCSO Pope has been able to identify over 850 suspects, averaging about one recognition every other shift.

“If you look at a picture enough times, there is usually something that sticks in the mind as distinctive. Maybe I can’t pinpoint what that something is at the time, but when I see the person in the flesh, it triggers that recognition,” Pope says. That’s what happened in March of 2011, when a simple glance at a computer screen was enough for him to recognize an offender. Detectives had been analyzing the footage for hours, but he just saw the suspect’s distinctive bum fluff and knew he had seen the guy before. He once identified a robber whose photo he had looked at a year before, and another from a grainy CCTV video, by a tiny mole on his face.