THE ART OF E-FIT

I don't know what art school the five-o creatives studied at, but their work is intense. The glut of recent e-misfits has lead me to conclude that the only reason e-fit "sketches" exist is because the police think they might humiliate Britain's criminals so much that they'll stop robbing and raping people. One of the first e-fit portraits I saw was lettuce head--the middle-aged face of cyberpunk as imagined by Hampshire Police and now the Greater Manchester force. Since then I've seen the police searching for tons of comic book-style criminals. I've compiled my favorites below.

"I'd urge people to take a good look at the e-fit and ask themselves whether they know who this man is," said GM Police Constable Adele Ainscough, who's looking for the man in connection with an attempted robbery of a pensioner at her home. Presumably her home is in space.

Apparently this guy's nine. Apparently this guy's human. Apparently he stole some kid's scooter. The last one I can believe, because he looks like he's about to dismember me through the screen. A lot of what makes these images strange is the way the hair clashes with what are, in relative terms at least, unerringly realistic pairs of eyes. It's like I just spent five minutes knocking together a crude self-portrait on MS Paint and some demon cursed my eyes right into the computer.

Another consistent theme with e-fits is the software's failure to correctly estimate the size of a face. This face allegedly belongs to a 5' 4" man who dislocated an 83-year-old woman's arm after breaking into her flat in August. It looks like they punished him by covering his lower face in honey and letting the bees at him.

Here is the same man after the bees.

Suspect #5 is wanted on suspicion of poorly impersonating a KKK caricature. He was last seen in Bedford, eating a watermelon and attempting to cook Popeye.

People bitch about immigrants and pedophiles, but no one has the courage to confront the real threat to society: the martian stoners slowly taking over our sleepy midlands towns.

Not sure what to say about this one. He looks like a Greek or Australian guy who woke up one day with his own face on his thumb. At least forensics won't have too hard a time matching up the prints.

If I were a burns victim who'd had their face reassembled from the faces of five other men, I'd probably think I could get away with stealing safes from pubs on Sunday afternoons too. "The man was a pretty odd-looking character and we didn't get a good look at his face, but he didn't look that odd," said a witness of the e-fit. "The man in the picture has half an ear--he didn't have half an ear. And his mustache wasn't like that."

"Does this look like your assailant, madam?"
"No, make the eyes much much much much bigger."

DICKIE TUMMY