Also this claim from Royalan is... not entirely accurate:
the documented inability for white people to accurately distinguish between individuals in another ethnic group.
The documented inability is for people of all ethnic groups to have a form of face blindness to those in other ethnic groups
who they have almost never seen before. In the United States (but not other countries) minorities do better, but still have it, at identifying individual white people because white people are the supermajority so they have more experience with distinctive white faces. But the best determining factor in identifying different individuals, other than perhaps some people simply being better at it (some people do legitimately have face blindness of all types after all), is familiarity with the individuals in question.
From everything I can find, none of the experts believe this is an issue you can "fix" and especially not by simply forcing everyone to interact with more people of different ethic groups since you would
still misidentify strangers.
The police in this case were unconsciously taking advantage of this fact (I doubt they were social scientists) but this happens with all witness testimony which is notoriously unreliable. It's one reason we've moved away from "point out the dude" "HIM THERE" in court rooms. (At least three states have already restricted or banned this practice and The Innocence Project (disclaimer: I have worked with them) opposes the practice and pushes for further limitations in other states.)