The author is from Inagi City, Tokyo, so within the Metropolitan Police Department’s jurisdiction, but when I was in elementary school, without a doubt, whether I saw it in handouts like printed sheets, or postings like posters…
A realistically conceivable explanation is that linking certain facial features to criminal tendencies may be the ghost of modern criminology’s “physiognomy” and “phrenology.” As for origins, in Europe in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, an Italian criminologist named Cesare Lombroso proposed the concept of the “born criminal,” and claimed that facial features such as “criminals have pointed ears,” “deep eye sockets,” and “protruding cheekbones” were signs of criminal tendencies. As for its influx and remnants in Japan, Western criminology was imported in the Meiji period, and began to be used in Japanese policing and corrective education, and even after the war, many in prisons and juvenile classification homes believed in a relationship between facial appearance and character. In police training materials and police magazines from the Showa to early Heisei eras, there are descriptions like “Discern suspicious persons from appearance and behavior.” It cannot be ruled out that, in a partially remaining form, it survived in the Tokyo metropolitan public-relations materials the author saw in the 2000s.
This case is part of the Mandela Effect case database based on "The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files" by Aoyama Takuto.