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Stephen Mancussi
Avi Margolies

     On Wednesday April 25, 2001, Stephen Mancussi visited Bronx Science. He is a Forensic and Digital Artist for the New York City Police Department. He is the senior forensic artist for the NYPD and his illustrations have been key in identifying suspects in many high profile cases. He has been a professional illustrator for over 18 years and has created book jacket covers, posters, and portraits; his work has been displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also, Mancussi has his own website at forartist.com.

     In his speech, Mancussi described that there are basically three parts to his job. There is composite art, which is a drawing of the suspect; there is image modification, which is photograph enhancing; and there is postmortem reconstruction, which is reconstructing deceased victims. With composite art, Mancussi said, he has to make a composite sketch from a verbal description of a witness or a victim of a crime. The composite sketch is meant to be a likeness or a similarity to the suspect, made from many individual body part descriptions. The description comes from a witness' memory, so it can be sketchy. Additionally, the description can be affected by the witness' perception of the person and by how many times the victim looked at the suspect; it can be vague. There are two processes in memory Mancussi described: recalling and recognizing. If there is a lineup, people can recognize a suspect, which is much easier. But as a forensic artist, Mancussi has to deal with recall memory, which is not as distinct and exact.

     In terms of memory, witnesses are classified as active, passive, or inactive. An active witness is the victim - the witness directly involved in the crime; they have the best memory. Someone standing across the street would be a passive witness and this person would have a weaker memory. An inactive witness would be someone who sees the suspect prior to or after the crime is committed and so this witness would have the weakest memory. Mancussi will show the witnesses a number of mug shots and he tells them to find people similar to the person they saw; this way the witnesses can use recognition memory instead of recall memory. The witnesses take different individual features from different pictures, and Mancussi makes a composite sketch.

     The actual drawing process has three stages, Mancussi explained. The first stage is the proportional stage, in which he figures out the distance between the eyes and where the other features are going to be on the head, but he does not deal with the actual features. In the second stage, he starts to draw actual features with shapes, for example squinty eyes, a droopy mouth, or thick lips. In the third stage, Mancussi adds texture, and the face becomes realistic looking. After the sketch is completed, it goes on the wanted poster. That process of getting it on the wanted poster used to take a month and a half, but now Mancussi can do it himself right away.

     Lastly, Mancussi described image modification and postmortem reconstruction. Image modification can include updating a drawing because a suspect has gotten older; Mancussi used to do this manually. Now, photographs can be digitally aged on the computer, so artists don't have to draw the suspect's picture anymore. Image modification can also help in a line up. In order to make a line up of similar people, for instance, if the suspect had a hat, Mancussi could digitally place the same hat on all of the people to make them look similar. With postmortem reconstruction, Mancussi said that when he gets the victim, the person is generally not down to the bone yet. He explained that the face is usually fairly intact so he can make a drawing of what the victim would look like alive to help identify the victim. The skull can tell proportional aspects of the face but cannot tell what fleshy parts of the face looked like. Mancussi is extremely good at his job and he loves to draw. He commented that he is very lucky that he gets to do what he loves doing and serve justice at the same time.