She Took a Picture of the Man Who Attacked Her. It Didn’t Matter.

Last year, on a cool September afternoon around 2 o’clock, a friend who lives in my building was walking to the post office in Downtown Brooklyn when she was attacked by a stranger. She had been on the phone when she vaguely noticed someone in her periphery. Suddenly he was right in front of her, mimicking her movements as she tried to step away. Assuming the position of a linebacker, he tackled her to the ground, leaving her at the curb with various injuries.

He walked away, but before long he turned around and came back. By this point my friend, Laura, a slight artist in her 50s (who asked that I not use her full name because she continues to feel vulnerable) was safely inside the closest building. From behind a glass door, she was able to take a picture of the man with her cellphone. And there was other visual evidence: A nearby security camera had recorded the attack, footage of which my friend eventually watched in the company of detectives at the 84th Precinct.

The incident struck me not only because it happened in the middle of the day, to someone I know and care about, in what is considered a very safe part of Brooklyn, but also because of what followed procedurally and what it revealed about the still dubious place of technology in modern law enforcement.

On Oct. 23, five weeks after the attack that left Laura with bruises to her lower back, a chipped tooth and scrapes on her elbow and forearm, she was called in to the precinct house to identify a suspect. There were no actual people in the lineup; instead, she faced a presentation of eight pictures of different men who, she said, looked unnervingly similar.

“The idea that I might wrongfully accuse someone weighed on me,’’ she told me later. Although she could quickly eliminate five of the eight, she found it hard to distinguish among the remaining three — each of whom had a point at the top of his cranium, she noticed, and eyes that were cast downward.

She made a selection. Then, detectives told her that her assailant was No. 5; she had chosen the wrong man. She hadn’t registered any details about her attacker’s appearance during the incident itself, but she had looked at the picture she had taken. He seemed to be in his 20s or early 30s, and was wearing patched jeans, white sneakers and a black parka. He had a vacant gaze, a small, distinctive bump over his right eyebrow and a tiny scar over his left. If you looked closely, you could see a cigarette clutched in his left hand.