HOLMES II Home Office Large Major Enquiry System

Since 1986 police forces and the Home Office have employed the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES) in all major incidents including serial murders, multi million pound fraud cases and major disasters.

HOLMES 2 is an investigation management system for law enforcement organisations to manage the complex process of investigating serious crimes. It enables them to improve effectiveness and productivity in crime investigations, helping to solve crimes more quickly and improve detection rates.

In 1994, the police service launched a plan to replace the existing HOLMES systems with a new system that would overcome these major weaknesses. They also took the opportunity to bring the police service up to date with new technology and provide a flexible system which would cope much more easily with changes in the future. This was the foundation for the successor to HOLMES, which became known as HOLMES 2.

The main aims of HOLMES 2 are to:

1. Collect and manage vast amounts of information and intelligence data.
2. Process and prioritise information to assist in the identification of suitable lines of enquiry.
3. Manage the allocation and progress of tasks assigned to investigating officers and detectives
4. Analyse information through graphical representation.
5. Produce documentation suitable for presentation in court.

The software package comprises three functional modules:

Module 1
The module consists of six computerised indices but HOLMES can, if required, produce a card index of its database, and this manual card index system, which is still regarded as the core of the administrative procedures, can be called into use.

Nominal Index
This index contains a record of each person who has come to notice during an enquiry. Each record is assigned a unique number and includes three pages of descriptive detail.

Vehicle Index
This index holds a record of each vehicle mentioned in an enquiry that may or may not be relevant to the incident, and the system allows part registration number, or even no registration number, to be recorded. Each record is given a unique number and can be searched on make, model and so on. Each vehicle can be cross referred to the other indexes.

Telephone Index
All telephone numbers used during an enquiry are recorded, linked and cross referred to the other indexes. Searches involve matching the last three digits of any telephone number.

Address Index
This is a two-tier index. The street index has details of of all streets, districts, and towns; and the house index contains all known house and flat numbers and names, together with the post codes. Again, all the information is cross referred.

Category Index
This index contains information which is not suitable for collation in any of the other indexes, e.g. knife, handgun and drugs, as well as identifying groups of people or places such as public houses and public meeting venues. There is strict control to ensure that categories are not created without a valid reason. Like the other indexes, there is cross referral.

Sequence of Events
This index produces information from documents in a chronological order. It is the only stand-alone index and cross-reference is made solely to the source document. It is used to confirm a person's story.

Module 2
Documentation received or issued by an incident room must be individually referenced with a unique number and HOLMES does this through its registration procedures. The progress of the documentation is then tracked through document and action management tables.

Module 3
HOLMES uses the computer facility to provide a typing service for statements received during the enquiry. Additionally, HOLMES provides a free text retrieval facility to search the unstructured information contained in the document text, for instance, ‘red’ jersey or ‘brown’ shoes.

Use of HOLMES
There is little doubt that an intricate and effective communication network is established each time HOLMES is used, and it can be said with some confidence that these procedures have had important pay-offs. The first occasion when the benefits of the system were publicly proclaimed occurred three years after the appraisal of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ inquiry had been completed. In February 1985, Malcolm Fairley (popularly known as the ‘Fox’) was given six life sentences for rape. Fairley was one of 3,011 persons picked out by the police computer as a possible suspect for rapes committed in different police force areas throughout England.

A significant use of HOLMES in Scotland followed the terrorist bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988 when 270 persons were murdered. Terminals were installed at Lockerbie Academy, New Scotland Yard, and Frankfurt. Each satellite incident room could access the HOLMES computer located in Strathclyde Police Headquarters through the public telephone network. This allowed each of the main agencies involved in the investigation access to a common database which undoubtedly contributed to the outcome of the enquiry.

Additionally, because of the flexibility of the six basic indices, HOLMES has also been used successfully in circumstances not originally envisaged - prison riots, industrial disputes and the vetting and accreditation of delegates at political events. But the success of using HOLMES has been matched by some general concerns about the value of the system. In broad terms, these might be regarded as technical, yet, they relate more seriously to the basic design of the system itself. Among the technical difficulties are those to do with linking incidents across force boundaries.