What you've just watched is a common occurrence these days. Most car thieves aren't caught but, when they are, it's because there's been an eyewitness to the crime. But just how reliable are eyewitnesses?
The thief was black. No, no, no he was white. Umm .... he was tall and thin. Oh and he was carrying a knife. Although he was about 300 meters away, I was really scared.
I was on my bike, and I saw the thief as I cycled past. It was quite dark, but I could tell he was old, at least 35,, with blonde hair. He was wearing jeans and a hoodie.
Yeah, I saw the thief. He stole that BMW. He was short and fat and he had brown hair. He was wearing black sweats. If I hadn't been driving my car, I would've stopped him.
The single biggest factor in suspects being wrongly convicted is eyewitness error. What we see, how we perceive it and what we remember are totally different things. And, to complicate matters, everyone has their own memory of the same event. Memory doesn't form an accurate photographic image in your mind. Rather, it creates a story that we re-invent when we tell it to someone.
As in every story, what happens depends on the person telling it. If we take the three eyewitness statements from earlier, we can see that they're complicated by personality, attitude, prejudice, age and exaggeration. That's not to say that the people were lying, they simply remember the crime in the way that suits them best. What makes things more complicated are the three stages of memory an eyewitness has to go through. The first stage is the perception of the crime.
In other words, how the witness sees and processes it. If the crime happens really fast, or at a distance, the eyewitness is more likely to get it wrong. Secondly, there's the period of time between the crime happening and the eyewitness giving evidence. If the gap is longer, giving evidence becomes more difficult. When the time comes for the eyewitness to give evidence, not only might they have forgotten the important details of the crime,
they can also be confused by the nature of the questions asked them by the police. For example, if the police officer asks: What kind of weapon was the suspect carrying: .this suggests to the eyewitness that the suspect was carrying a weapon. The eyewitness might become convinced that the suspect was carrying a knife, even if that were not the case.
The human brain is a complex machine that has a life of its own underneath our conscious understanding of it. If you're ever a witness to a crime, remember that what you saw, what you tell the police and what actually happened might be three different things! However, don't worry. All that's expected of you is to tell the truth.