Finding the Bad Guy's Car

Source: Karolus_Br/OpenClipart

In our last Forensic View, we talked about the Beltway Snipers of 2002. They killed many innocent victims around Washington, DC, from the safety of their blue Chevrolet Caprice. This vehicle, for psychological reasons we considered in our last post, was believed by a great many people to be a white or cream-colored van. As we observed, you can’t be much wronger than that, and wronger isn’t even a word.

One day, I was commuting on a California highway when I chanced to see a huge billboard beside the road. Usually, this sign demands that you buckle your seatbelt, or watch out for highway workers. On that particular day, however, it asked motorists to be on the lookout for a car in which some child molester had abducted a prepubescent girl. He (the abductor) was driving a specific brand of silver-gray car. We, the motorists, were to look out for this car.

So I did. I had a good view of the cars around me. At least five of the dozen or so I could see were silver-grey. It's a very popular color. As to the types of vehicles—well, I couldn’t identify any of them. A professional mechanic or car enthusiast probably could have done so, but most of us are neither. Many modern cars, even from different manufacturers, are remarkably similar in shape.

They weren’t always. Decades ago, automobile companies prided themselves on the distinctive shapes of their products, which made many kinds of cars immediately recognizable, easily distinguishable from competing brands. But in the modern world, cars are generally designed for other corporate purposes, and in the interest of fuel economy and low construction costs. So, many modern vehicles share similar shapes, shapes that are harder to distinguish. This presents a real problem for eyewitnesses and for law enforcement.

Granted, cars bear different corporate logos; but although it’s a good bet that the tiny logos are very meaningful to their creators, a lot of them look like somebody trying to write in tiny Klingon to the rest of us. The upshot is that even if the ConHugeCo Groundsquirrel Sedan, in pearl-gray, is immediately distinguishable to its builders from the HugeConCo Chipmunk Sedan, in gray-pearl, most of us are looking at basically the same battleship-gray motorized blob with a tiny artistic logo swirl of what looks like a Klingon battle cry someplace on the back fender.

In view of all this, it can be a little hard to find a child abductor’s car.

Years ago (Villegas et al., 2005; see review in Sharps, 2017), my students and I published a paper, one of very few, on the eyewitness identification of vehicles. We found that under ideal visual circumstances, our potential witnesses identified vehicles correctly less than 24 percent of the time on average. Moreover, they were far more likely to make mistakes with regard to vehicle models than they were with regard to vehicle colors. In other words, they were more likely to mistake a red sedan for a red coupe than to mistake a red sedan for a blue sedan. Why?

In previous research, I introduced the Gestalt/Feature-Intensive (G/FI) continuum of cognitive processing (e.g., Sharps, 2017). We may process things, cognitively, in terms of their specific features (FI processing), or in terms of their overall characteristics, their general Gestalt (G) appearance, with relatively minimal reference to the features that contribute to that appearance. Herein lies a major problem with eyewitness identification of vehicles. The color of a given car (e.g., red,) is feature-intensive in nature. We all know what is meant by the word “red,” as opposed to “blue” or any other color.

On the other hand, what is the name of the auto part that extends down from the roof to the back door? It must have one, but damned if I know what it is, and I’ve never been able to find out, even from expert mechanics. Yet that part is one of the things that determines the basic shape of the car.

Color is feature-intensive. Everybody with color vision knows what “red” means. But the shape of a car, the determination of its model, is largely gestalt in nature, not immediately accessible to linguistic convention. If that shape is relatively similar to that of other vehicle models, eyewitness confusion is likely to reign. This will also be a problem if you can’t verbally identify the manufacturer’s logo. Even in Klingon.

So, we tend to describe a car as red, or silver-grey, or whatever; but its identity as a Chevy or a Ford, or whatever, is mainly inherent in shape factors which are very common among different brands, very subtle in what differences there are. This makes eyewitness identification relatively unreliable, as we’ve demonstrated in previous research (Villegas et al., 2005).

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What does this mean to the criminal investigator? It means that an eyewitness account of the color of a given vehicle, in feature-intensive terms, is more likely to be reliable than an account of the vehicle model, generally based more in Gestalt terms, in the verbally-inaccessible shapes of vehicle components which are similar among vehicle brands. Red is red (with obvious variability in shade and other color characteristics); but the shapes of fenders will probably be processed very differently by different witnesses, in Gestalt rather than feature-intensive terms.

It would be helpful if citizen-witnesses were instructed in these facts. Since they aren't, the wise highway patrol or other investigative officer will realize that the color of a vehicle, in feature-intensive terms, tends to be more reliable than the model of the vehicle, which is generally rendered in the eyewitness mind in relatively alinguistic Gestalt terms of shape.

Hopefully, such officers will find the bad guys, in their vehicles with their victims, before something genuinely horrible happens.