INTERPOL survey of the use of speaker identification by law enforcement agencies.
A survey was conducted of the use of speaker identification by law enforcement agencies around the world. A questionnaire was circulated to law enforcement agencies in the 190 member countries of INTERPOL. 91 responses were received from 69 countries. 44 respondents reported that they had speaker identification capabilities in house or via external laboratories. Half of these came from Europe. 28 respondents reported that they had databases of audio recordings of speakers. The clearest pattern in the responses was that of diversity. A variety of different approaches to speaker identification were used: The human-supervised-automatic approach was the most popular in North America, the auditory-acoustic-phonetic approach was the most popular in Europe, and the spectrographic/auditory-spectrographic approach was the most popular in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South and Central America. Globally, and in Europe, the most popular framework for reporting conclusions was identification/exclusion/inconclusive. In Europe, the second most popular framework was the use of verbal likelihood ratio scales.
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Geoffrey Stewart
GS
Morrison
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France. Electronic address: f.sahito@interpol.int.
Farhan Hyder
FH
Sahito
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Gaëlle
G
Jardine
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Djordje
D
Djokic
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Sophie
S
Clavet
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Sabine
S
Berghs
Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
Caroline
C
Goemans Dorny
D056667:Biometric Identification / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006077:Government Agencies; D006801:Humans; D035846:Law Enforcement; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014831:Voice
Forensic voice comparison; INTERPOL; Law enforcement; Speaker identification; Survey