POLICE SCIENCE

Hokitika Guardian, 30 May 1935, Page 3

POLICE SCIENCE

ENGLISH PAPER'S VIEWS

In the art of making detection fit the crime, remarks the •‘Times’’ the police have to use every resource to ttunpensate lor the initial handicap under which the criminal of average ability can usually place them. The chief part of their activity may rest on "information received,” but for corrohatipn, for the suggestion of new lines of inquiry; sometimes for the evidence which will clinch a case, they cannot afford to neglect any means of extracting the utmost from the data

; of a on me. The requisite .for this, in spite of a popular disposition to attribute to detectives a genius denied other hanl- ■ wonting men, is not intuition, hut exact knowledge, touching, often on the various fields of medicine, chemistry, applied physics and oilier branches of science. Such studies are those of the laboratory, an adjunct to police work which Great Britain, though it lias learned l to appreciate the services of independent scientific experts, has so far lagged behind some otJiers in providing.

But willi the opening (last month) of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory at Hendon, the defect will be in a large degree remedied. Scotland Yard will now have its disposal as a matter of routine, the equipment for a branch of criminal investigation of which the need grows with every new opportunity the conditions of modern life offer tlie offender against society. 'Hi ere is no suggestion that the I work of the laboratory will bring aboiut any immediately obvious advance in crime detection; its justification is that here, at any rate, the police will he able to evolve a technique which can be applied irrespective of the criminals method, for the employment of science in' crime is happily rare outside ■ fiction.