Alteration of Criminal Identity

Plastic surgery gives one the choice of a new look, and a new start. When in the wrong hands, murderers, arsonists, rapists and the like are given a new start. Writers have long ago imagined this possibility and written them into stories of Hannibal Lector. Some time after, criminals adopted aesthetic surgery as a tool for crime, and this continues in the present day and age.

Not long ago from the time of writing on Sep 1 2012, Reinhold Neumann was arrested in Las Vegas. Notably, he looked entirely different from his profile in 1999. Neumann "spent 13 years on the lam undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance, stealing identities and committing an assortment of other crimes" (Darymple, 2012).

Remedies

There have been many other cases of crooks evading capture via the use of aesthetic surgery. This loophole is present because current facial recognition software often is not able to work with changes in lighting and facial position, much less the changes incurred by facelifts, dermal fillers, Botox or rhinoplasty. As such, these crooks have been able to be on the run.

There is good news. A team of computer scientists at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has developed facial-recognition software that can overcome the changes of plastic surgery (Sattler, 2012). In essence, this programme analyses and compares individual features on a general database of random faces. Any matching characteristics between the two composite pictures can be easily identified a nose or eyebrow may stay the same even if the cheeks have expanded. It seems that this software has great potential to help the police and lawmakers identify disguised criminals by comparing with current photos or mugshots (Sattler, 2012).