What is HOLMES? HOLMES is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. It was so named because it is the same name as the great detective Sherlock Holmes. It is a computer system that the UK police use to collate all of their data about crimes in the country. At its simplest, HOLMES is a database of all the crime that happens in the UK.
The prototype for the system was first launched in 1974. It was called the Major Incident Project, and it was a research project by the Police Scientific Development Branch, a division of the Home Office. Computers were just becoming a thing and the home office wondered how they might be used to help in the investigation of crimes. Investigations of crimes were just becoming too big for people to organize them. When a crime happened in the UK, whichever police force was involved would open an incident room and all of the information they found would go through that room. With a small crime, that was no problem, but if crimes were larger, more complex, and lasted for years, the amount of information could be staggering. And even if a police squad could keep on top of the information they had, they had no way of cross-referencing it with information in other towns. If there was a similar crime in a different city, that would only pop up if someone knew about it. It couldn’t be checked automatically.
The prototype of the HOLMES system was being worked on in the 1970s, but it was the investigation into Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, between 1975 and 1981 that showed the government how necessary it was. Sutcliffe murdered thirteen women and girls and attempted to murder seven others. It took the police a long time to catch him and once they had, they discovered that he had been interviewed nine times during the investigation. The problem was that all of the information they had was kept on paper. Sutcliffe’s information was in several forms on several different pieces of paper. There were teams of police whose jobs were solely to manage the paper. The police appealed for information and they were swamped with information. During the investigation they conducted over 130,000 interviews and they recorded 268,000 names. They recorded 5.4 million vehicle registration numbers and they did background checks on 158,000 of those vehicles. The police carried out 151,000 actions. At times, they received 1,000 letters a day from the public. It is impossible to keep control of that much information. When it was discovered that Sutcliffe’s information was in the system and if it had been found he might have been stopped earlier, there was public uproar. But, no human, or team of humans, can keep on top of that much information.
And that is why computers were brought in. Computers can store, analyze, and cross reference far more information far more quickly than humans can. HOLMES is used to manage information. Everything that is produced in the investigation is put into HOLMES. Witness statements, reports, interviews, messages and other investigative information go into the central system. Then HOLMES indexes everything. It creates searchable records of people, places, vehicles, addresses and other details mentioned in the investigation. Having all of this information allows the police to search easily and cross-reference information. It lets them find connections, such as the same vehicle appearing in several witness statements. Then it manages the actions that need to be taken. It can suggest action and it can record the progress of actions. HOLMES keeps a track of all documents and how far they are through the processing process. If things are not finished, it can tell someone. All of this helps the police manage investigations and exchange and coordinate their information.
HOLMES has been incredibly successful and revolutionized police investigations after the Peter Sutcliffe mistakes. That doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but it is much easier for the police to keep track of all the data and cross-reference it. Recent updates to the system have added in AI. It can analyze huge amounts of information and find connections that people might have missed. It can analyze hundreds of hours of CCTV footage in a fraction of the time. The police are adapting with the times. We have become far more of an information world than we were in Peter Sutcliffe’s time and a police investigation might have many times the amount of information to do through that it would have had in the 1970s. Without AI, it would be unmanageable. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOLMES_2
https://www.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/707808827568356
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032258X8505800304
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe
Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/detectives-looking-at-evidences-on-cork-board-8369522/