It’s so elementary — for Holmes the super-’tec

Press, 2 November 1984, Page 13

It’s so elementary — for Holmes the super-’tec

Holmes, the greatest detective in history, is about to strike his deadliest blow against crime. Not Sherlock, the famous fictional sleuth, but a modern-day counterpart with skills which make Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective look . . . well, elementary.

This Holmes will be able to conduct hundreds of enquiries at once, 24 hours a day, because he is one of the new breed of crimebusting computers. Officially called the Home Office Large Major Enquiry ’ System, Holmes goes into service in January, to make the work of Britain’s police easier and more efficient. He will store all the information that pours into police incident rooms throughout the country, check it at the rate of a million words a minute — and chum out instant lists of suspects. Soon, Holmes will be able to link up with similar computers in the United States, West Germany, and elsewhere, to make life more difficult for international terrorists and globe-trotting criminals.

The arrival of Holmes means that soon there will be no need for police to spend hours checking over statements, photographs, and files of fingerprints. Instead of battling with mountains of paper work, they will put their questions into the computer, and get the answers within seconds.

A senior officer working on the Holmes project says: “If a witness to a major crime has seen a St drive off in a red car, s will come up with every other reference to red cars made recently to the police. “If the car had a dent or a damaged wing, we can find any matching cars involved in previous incidents. By cross-checking all the available information, we can soon see if there is a link between two separate investigations.” Fast and accurate cross-checking is what the police want most from their new electronic aids. They say the availability of a computer would have enabled the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, to be caught much earlier. And in the United States, com-

By

SIMON MARSH,

Features International

puter-checking is the main weapon against the upsurge in random multiple killings, in which drifters roam from state to state carry ng out pointless murders. The success of the fingerprint computer in Los Angeles has shown how electronics can cut the crime rate. It stores millions of prints and takes only seconds to offer a list of suspects based on a single fingerprint from a crime scene.

“Before the computer, you had to spend hours going throught the files — or just get lucky. Today you can eliminate suspects, draw up a short-list and identify your man in just a few minutes,” says a Los Angeles detective. Scotland Yard admires the Californian system but claim that their own is even better. Called Automatic Fingerprint Recognition (A.F.R.), it is the product of 20 years’ research. AJ'.R., built by the Logica Software Company, is capable of storing the fingerprints of 660,000 criminals known to be active in London. “We believe it will lead to a 55 per cent improvement in the number of criminals identified by the prints they leave,” says the Logica manager, Dr Michael Bradbury. “This is a true statistic, because the machine can work so much harder than a man. Even though men are probably better at the job, the machine will always win because of its bigger workload.” Previously, an officer who took a set of prints from a crime scene, had to classify them himself, by noting characteristics such as “loops”, “whorls,” and “tented arches”.

Now, he simply feeds the print into the computer. If he asks for just one matching set, there is a 60

per cent chance that A.F.R. will come up with the right man. If the machine is allowed to select 20 possible matches, the likelihood of identifying the criminal leaps to 75 per cent. As one officer put it “That should, strike fear into the heart of your average thief — but computers should also help us to catch much bigger fish.”The "multiple criminal” is the man in the computers’ sights. Previously, a criminal who spread his activities over a wide area knew that he would be investigated separately by a number of police forces.

They would not know they were looking for the same man — and so would not necessarily pool information which might lead to his capture.

Now, computers can compare fingerprints, methods of operation, descriptions, and statements — and, if a common denominator is lurking in the records, the name should immediately appear on the print-out

Interpol, the Paris-based international policing agency, is very enthusiastic about linking up the computers of the world’s police forces so that the movements and activities of international crooks can be identified.

At a recent international conference of forensic scientists, Britain’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Lawrence Byford, said his police now led the world in the use of computers to investigate major crimes.