Friends call Constable Collins Rain Man or Yoda or simply The Oracle. But to Scotland Yard, London’s metropolitan police force, he is known as a “super recognizer.” He has a special gift of facial recall powers that enables him to match even low-quality and partial imagery to a face he has seen before, on the street or in a database and possibly years earlier. The last time he had come face to face with Mr. Prince was during a fleeting encounter in 2005.

Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory: Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180.

“Computers are no match for the super recognizers,” said Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of the Central Forensic Image Team at Scotland Yard and mastermind of the squad.

WITH its estimated one million security cameras, London is pioneering a new area of detection, one that could be cheaper than DNA analysis and fingerprinting and relies above all on human superpowers. Scotland Yard’s ever-expanding team of 152 super recognizers is made up of men and women from across the force who score at the top end of a facial recognition test originally devised at Harvard in 2009. Constable Collins, the star of the unit, is in the rarefied 1 percent range.

Traffic police and jailers, those patrolling neighborhoods and officers who specialize in violent crime, the super recognizers have more than tripled the number of identifications since April 2013. They are deployed to pick out known thieves and sexual offenders in crowds of tens of thousands at rock concerts and to round up pickpockets at tourist spots like Buckingham Palace. This year, they solved the high-profile murder of a teenage girl that had led to the mobilization of 600 police officers across eight forces, the biggest search operation since the 2005 London bombings.