Toothy, Grinning Police Composite Sketch Goes Viral

Police in Warwickshire, England, on Tuesday released an electronic-composite sketch of one of the two men suspected of robbing a local woman's home, with the hopes of someone stepping forward with new information.

Instead of getting tips, all the police got were jokes, as the sketches have generated widespread mocking on social media.

The computer-generated sketch of a stubbly man with an impossibly wide and toothy grin was turned into a widely liked and shared Twitter moment. It reminded commenters of various characters from various eras of pop culture, ranging from the Cheshire Cat of “Alice in Wonderland” fame or the late-2000s YouTube sensation Annoying Orange.

Instead of the pedestrian numbers that a police department’s tweet about a local burglary might usually get, the Warwickshire police post garnered nearly 20,000 retweets and 30,000 likes in about 24 hours.

It also generated plenty of humorous photoshops and gifs in the comment section.

The image was an Electronic Facial Identification Technique, or E-FIT. Unlike traditional, hand-drawn police sketches, these are computer-generated pictures compiled from eyewitness descriptions of suspects. The idea is to create a more realistic image than a hand-drawn sketch.

Both traditional sketches and E-FITs have a tendency to look a little goofy or unsettling, but police forces around the world use them because they are helpful. Numerous criminals have been successfully identified and apprehended based on sketches that bore only the mildest resemblance to them.

The Warwickshire police force was self-aware about the nature of the photo, but promised it was not a joke. The intention was that the massive attention generated by the image going viral would help them solve the case and help the victim out.