Mike Neville Under the spotlight in this months ‘Meet the Locals’ article is Mike Neville who has had a fascinating career in the army and in policing. He settled in New Milton on retirement. Mike was born and raised in Bolton in Lancashire. Whilst attending the local Grammar School he joined the army cadets which set him on his early career path. At the age of 16 he enlisted in the Junior Leaders unit of the Royal Armoured Corps at Bovington in Dorset. It was almost inevitable that Mike would have ended up in the army as he was the fourth generation of his family to serve in the armed forces. Mike’s adult service in the army was with the Royal Military Police. He was posted to Munster in Germany and to Northern Ireland. After leaving the army in 1988, Mike joined the Metropolitan Police. After training at Hendon, he was posted to Clapham as a probationary constable. Whilst serving as a beat officer Mike
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became an instructor in the army cadets. As an officer he commanded a detachment. This was extremely helpful as it enabled him to get to know the local youths and their parents on his beat and for them to know him. It meant that Mike was not just ‘another copper’ but was one who was clearly seen to be working for the benefit of the local community. It enabled him to defuse tensions in the local community. Mike became a trainee Detective Constable, still based at Clapham. It was here that he and a colleague ended up dealing with a string of armed robberies at banks and post offices. They were carried out over a wide area of London by the same gang. Often there were CCTV images of the suspects but at that time, these were not being shared across the whole of the Metropolitan Police, just to the police units nearest the crime scene. Mike and his colleague managed to arrest and successfully prosecute the gang
who were responsible for at least 132 robberies. Mike realised that the system the Metropolitan Police had for managing the CCTV images of suspects needed to be overhauled. In 2006 he set up a dedicated unit that was tasked with reviewing CCTV footage from hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras in the capital. Mike became aware of police officers who were exceptional at recognising suspects from CCTV and other images. In 2009, in the USA Professor Richard Russell was studying a condition known as prosopagnosia where people have great difficulty recognising faces, sometimes even their own in a photograph. Russell heard that there were individuals at the other extreme of the scale and carried out test on them and found that they were about 90% accurate in their recognition of faces. As a result, Russell wrote an academic paper about those with this extraordinary skill and named them ‘Super Recognisers’. UK based psychologist Josh Davis wrote his dissertation on forensic analysis of CCTV footage. His paper was
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ons.co.uk
