Driven by budget constraints and the ubiquity of surveillance video, many police departments have scaled back on the practice. In Los Angeles, sketches are done by an artist on contract. The Chicago Police Department has not had a staff sketch artist since 1993. Two full-time forensic artists in Philadelphia do fewer sketches and more odd jobs, like putting decals on squad cars.
"Last year, we only did 14," said Lt. John Rauchut, who heads the Philadelphia Police Department's Graphic Arts Unit. "Ten years ago, we did 147 sketches and it's been declining ever since."
But not so in New York City.
Here, the Police Department's three-person Artist Unit cranks out hundreds of drawings a year, plastering posters with grim drawings of wanted men and women in a style still reminiscent of the days of the Wild West or Jack the Ripper.
In a technology-obsessed department actively pursuing futuristic tools — like a scanner to detect hidden guns or robust facial recognition software — the sketches still hold sway for the simple reason that, despite their seeming imprecision, detectives still use them to catch suspects.
"When they invented photography, they thought that was going to do away with the painter, but it didn't," said Detective Juan Perez, a veteran artist, sitting at his sun-soaked desk on the fifth floor of Police Headquarters. "Same thing with composite sketches. We use the video stills. It enhances our sketches."
In New York, the sketches have portrayed the infamous, like the Son of Sam serial killer, as well as more garden-variety suspects; they can also put a face on a child long missing, or a corpse with no name.
Even when video is present, one of the first questions that supervisors ask their detectives after a crime — from an iPhone snatching to a killing — is whether a sketch was done. That is because the chief of detectives, Phil T. Pulaski, has pushed the continued use of sketches in all manner of cases; getting a sketch is now part of the checklist for all investigations, a procedural rundown that includes canvassing for witnesses and checking the area for video cameras.
"The current chief of d's is an advocate," said Deputy Chief William Aubry, commanding officer of the Forensic Investigation Division, which oversees the artists. "It's one of the first things he looks for: 'Did you get the sketch artist involved?' Call on weekends, call at night."
Detective Perez, 48, is one of the three artists who answer those calls, which have brought him to the hospital bedside of a wounded police officer and to view the badly decomposed body of a woman in Queens. In the latter case, he made a line drawing of a tattoo found on her body — a dragon — in the hope that it would be recognized. (So far it has not been.)
Chief Aubry recalled the case of a serial rapist in Manhattan in which Detective Perez did a sketch based on victims' descriptions. "His photo, his image ended up helping identify that individual when he was walking by," he said.
The Police Department produced 273 sketches in 2012, down slightly from 326 a decade earlier. But the number is up substantially from the 139 done in 1992, the year before Detective Perez, from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, began working as an artist.
The sketch is only as good as the information provided by witnesses or victims, both of whom may have only partial recollection of the suspect's face, sketch artists said. In some cases, the person being sketched is not related to the crime at all: a suspicious man near a Brooklyn crime scene, sketched based on witnesses, became the face of a serial killer last year until surveillance video from a subsequent killing emerged. Or a sketch may be wildly off the mark; think of the image of the Unabomber put out before the arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski.
The department did not provide statistics for the number of positive identifications from sketches, and some detectives privately grumble that the time spent taking a witness or a victim down to headquarters — often soon after a crime has been committed — could be better used on the street.
Chief Aubry said that some younger detectives "may not know that a sketch artist can help," adding that "many times you'll have a seasoned investigator come in here and the sketch was very accurate, was on the money, and that news spreads through the squad."
More than a dozen such successful sketches — each paired with a vacant-eyed arrest photo — stare out from a bulletin board across from the detective's desk in the Artist Unit.
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