Arizona police department using AI to revolutionize suspect sketches

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — The Goodyear Police Department is bringing forensic sketches to life. And they’re using artificial intelligence to do it.

Officer Michael Bonasera, a forensic sketch artist for Goodyear Police Department, said he started playing around with the new technology out of curiosity but was amazed by the results.

“The first one, it made my jaw drop,” Bonasera said. “That is the person if I was to see an image in my mind of a real person from that sketch.”

For decades, detectives have successfully found people of interest based on hand sketches. 

Bonasera said the process using a victim or witness’ memory to put a visualize a person is the same, but now he puts his completed sketch into Chat GPT and prompts it to generate an realistic image based on his drawing. 

“There has to be that interview process, you have to have some skills to get it into that program and generate that image,” Bonasera said.  “You can then ask it to age it five years, three years, ten years, and it’s a swipe instead of me sitting there with a drawing and having to erase.”

Goodyear Police released its first AI generated image to the public with hopes of identifying an attempted kidnapping suspect.

“It’s not probable cause to arrest somebody based off my drawing, and that’s just always, that’s been around forever. It’s just you get to that possible lead so we can talk to that person,” Bonasera said.

Bonasera said AI won’t take his job, but it will open doors for investigations past and present.

“We’re going to take cold cases, and these are from years and years ago that maybe they didn’t identify these people with the drawing, but now taking it and making it a real person is huge,” Bonasera said.

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