Most, if not all police forces already have, or are in the process of acquiring, information handling computers of some kind. The background to the present situation is best described in the pamphlet The Police Use Of Computers, parts of which were reproduced in State Research No 29, and were used by the National Computer Centre’s Privacy In The Computer Age. (1)
To date the police use of computers has been fragmented, with individual forces acquiring a variety of systems. In part this is a result of the traditional autonomy of the individual police force; in part the consequence of learning to apply new technology. The police (and the software companies) have spent the last few years learning how to do it. (2)
But now the Home Office (which pays half the costs of a force’s computer development) appears to be trying to introduce a degree of standardisation in police computer systems through its involvement in the development of the joint Humberside/Kent computer. Humberside’s Chief Constable wrote recently that
“The Home Office looks to the proposed system as future standard for the whole of the Police Service.” (3)
How successful this belated standardisation will be is unpredictable. Police forces in this country are keen to retain their operational autonomy, but how long this will survive this government’s assault on the general autonomy of local government remains to be seen.(4)
But even if the Kent/Humberside system is not exactly replicated throughout the rest of the currently computer-less forces, it at least indicates what the Home Office would like to see, and thus may tell us something about the “national strategy ” referred to in the 1981 Report of the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and the “National Standards Manual” referred to in the 1982 Annual Report of the Chief Constable of Kent.
Until recently much of the anxiety about the police use of computers was focused on the applications of computers to police intelligence gathering. This anxiety was reflected in the report of the Lindop Committee on Data Protection which drew a sharp distinction between criminal records (“factual and verifiable”) and criminal intelligence (“hearsay, speculative suppositional and unverifiable”). Just how suppositional, unverifiable and speculative police intelligence can be is illustrated by these quotations from some intelligence sheets which were leaked from the Skelmersdale Police. These are items (with the names and addresses changed by us) from the Skelmersdale Collators’ Office.
The Right Man For The Job
John Smith (10.10.56) (damage) of Almond Avenue, Paddington – known affectionately to his CB mates as ‘Tonka Toy’ – paid another return visit to our fair Division at 3.30 am on Friday 10.9.82 when he was stop/checked in his nifty yellow Capri RTD 432Y in Alton Road, Skem. Gracefully reclining in the passenger seat was none other than school breaker and suspected druggie Alan Patson (31/3/62) (wounding burglary theft, damage) of First Avenue Orrell, whose unforgettable features are pictured left. Smith, a State benefit subscriber, augments his hard-earned dole by working on the door at Wigan Pier keeping out (other) undesirables. Smith and Patson are well acquainted with the finer points of our Division and are worth every stop/check they can get.
On A Higher Plane
The Age of Enlightenment Company – a mystical meditation – type set-up based in Skem – attracts seekers of truth from some very exotic places and the latest recruit would appear to be Michael Paul Williams (28/3/54) who hails from 43 Ivanhoe Drive – a part of Glasgow more familiarly known as The Gorbals. Williams, who was checked on his Honda 500 motorbike OTX 65T on Stardive Road at 1.20 am on Friday 12/9/82 was apparently bound over (in the Met) for possessing explosives – but not convicted as such. His address in Skem is 23 Albeck Road, the home of a Mary Simmons.
Your Every Wish
The ever-fortunate residents of the Beaconview Old Peoples’ Home in Kiln Lane, Skem, are currently benefitting from the attentions of John Andrew Wilson (3.2.64) (burglary, theft) of 223 Fairview L12, who is taking part in Hindley Borstal’s Community Scheme. Wilson’s spell of duty at the home terminates on 15.10.82
Comment is probably superfluous, but notice how the second contains something which is extraordinarily improbable – being bound over for explosives; how the first contains suspicions and prejudice (‘State benefit subscriber’); and how the third manages to make it ‘obvious’ that any offence in the vicinity of the Home mentioned is going to be the work of the individual named. Notice, too – and this is a feature of most of the 9 items on the Skelmersdale Collator Sheets we have – that none of the stop/checks carried out lead to anything. Nothing, that is except an increase in police intelligence. Finally, it would be interesting to know (a) how the police know when an individual is unemployed and (b) how they know an individual’s CB sign. (Or did they just ask?)
When you add this kind of quality to the fact that if Thames Valley and Lothian and Borders Police are any kind of guide, the police have files on 10% of the population (most of which are files on people without criminal records), and that’s 10% before information handling was computerised, then paranoia-inducing fantasies about ‘police states’ don’t sound quite so over the top.(5)
Possibly in response to the criticism of the computerisation of police intelligence files, in 1983 the Home Office produced a definition of the “computerised criminal information system” (CIS from now on) in which the distinction between fact and hearsay disappears. A CIS is one which
“records information hitherto kept on paper relating to criminals, crime and criminal activities. The Home Office does not distinguish between criminal information and criminal intelligence for this purpose.”
In a sense this definition is true to the police’s own practice: the clear distinction between fact and hearsay by the Lindop Committee is not recognized by the police themselves. In Humberside, for example, the criminal records are part of the Intelligence Unit . In the Humberside Chief Constable’s Report for 1977, a sense of the values and priorities of the police is revealed when the report says
“The Criminal Intelligence/Record Unit will also be the central office for all Police National Computer enquiries. Staff have been selected and are now being trained….to provide a 24 hour service supporting PNC enquiries with all-in force indices and records.” (“force indices” is police jargon for intelligence files.) (6)
The Humberside/Kent system set out below embodies the blurring of “records” and “ntelligence”. (7) The crucial categories are Crime Reporting and Criminal Information.
“The Crime/Offence report carries a great deal of intelligence. It provides details of all suspects and witnesses and a police officer’s subjective interpretations. It can also provide a record of any person detained for questioning, charted and arrested, and of action taken (if any) against individuals. It deals with race….it deals with personality, whether or not a person is judged by the police to be excitable, arrogant, effeminate, a liar, or whether the person requires to be dealt with firmly or responds to sympathy. It records cheque accounts and credit card numbers. Finally it has a large section for the individual officer to make comments about the crime that has been committed.” (8)
The scale of the intelligence that is available through the crime report is suggested in a recent article which estimated that if the 686,000 crime reports in London in 1982 had been computerised, they would reveal the names and addresses of up to 3 million people. (9)
Humberside Police
Future Applications
Crime Reporting (Go Live 1985)
For each crime reported to the Police there will be a corresponding computer file within the Crime Reporting Application. This file will consist of a number of pages of information which can be summarised under the following headings of identification details, aggrieved and offence details, method used, property details, offender/wanted person details, and general information. The data needed to create a crime record within the Crime Reporting Application will be provided from the crime report. On creation of this record, the information contained therein will be automatically transferred and validated by the operator against the information held on the crime report. Crimes will be weeded from the system after three years.
Criminal Information (Go Live 1985)
The system will store the details of all criminals in Humberside who have been convicted of a recordable offence. Each record will consist of sets of data covering the following areas: description, names, addresses, vehicles, M.O, convictions, checks, general information and fingerprints. The file will be searchable both directly on keys such as name and indirectly on items such as height, sex, etc. The primary use of the system is to improve operational access to information. The system will be used in the administrative procedures to produce internal forms and lists of convictions for court. The system will have automatic weeding of records and data within records and procedures for reviewing information when it is put on. Backup will be by means of microfiche containing limited information.
Message Switch (Go Live 1985)
The message switch (MSX) will allow the despatch and receipt of messages between terminals (VDU to VDU or VDU to printer). It will replace the existing teleprinter network and expand to all stations within the force area making a speedier and more efficient message passing service. It will be possible to re-transmit PNC generated messages to the force. There will be a telex link but this will be manual.
P.N.C. Interface (Go Live 1985)
The PNC interface will enable the VDUs on the local computer network to access the PNC files as if they were PNC dedicated terminals. It is proposed to limit the updating capability – this function being performed centrally at a PNC bureau using PNC dedicated terminals.
Command and Control
Pursuant to the reorganisation of the force, a research project has been commenced with a view to determining the most effective manner in which to command and control resources. This may lead to a form of computerised command and control system, the implementation of which would not be anticipated until 1987 or after.
Criminal Information
In this function criminal records (details of convictions) and police intelligence are being combined. The old paper criminal record files account for the following categories in the Criminal Information package of the CIS:
- description, name, MO and fingerprints
while the other categories
- vehicles, checks and general information
are categories of information which would have been called ‘intelligence’ before the new Home Office definition.
Information on vehicle ownership will presumably come mainly from the PNC’s duplicate of the DVLC records in Swansea. ‘Checks’ refers to stop/checks of individuals (referred to frequently in the Skelmersdale collator sheets) which are processed through the force’s Intelligence Unit. What ‘general information’ might include is anybody’s guess. This quotation from a member of Lothian and Borders police gives some sense of the possibilities:
“Every name we have here is in fact the life of the person as we have it. Take this man here. He was convicted in the sixties and all this information has been compiled since then. I can tell you who he was associating with in 1969, who he was living with and where he was living right up to the present day. We’ve got a record of all his known associates, previous addresses, cars he’s used and all the cross references.” (Detective Inspector, Crime Intelligence.) (10)
Notice too, that the system will be “searchable…on items such as height and sex etc”, a function designed to allow the police to carry out speculative searches of the data base.
It isn’t possible from the sketches of the system given above to work out the relationship between the criminal records and the intelligence files. If this account of the system is accurate (and there is no guarantee of that) it would seem that the computer will only carry files on people who have criminal records, and the criminal record will form the basis of the computer entry supplemented by material from the intelligence files. The obvious inference is that the intelligence files on people without a criminal record – and from Kinsey and Baldwin’s research that would be at least 50% of the files – will remain as paper files. But without seeing the Operational Requirements of the system it is impossible to know anything for sure. And at present the Humberside Police Committee just don’t have the political bottle that their Merseyside counterparts had and are unlikely ever to persuade the Chief Constable to cough up the details of the system. (11)
Even if this apparent separation of ‘criminals’ for the computer and non-criminals kept on paper is built into the system, is there anything to prevent the transfer of (non-criminal) intelligence to the computer? The PNC, which is supposed to only store factual information, is known to have intelligence stored in it. Indeed, Humberside’s Chief Constable casually admits doing so in his report for 1980:
“manually maintained indices are occasionally transferred to the computer.” (ie to the PNC)
I find it difficult to believe that Intelligence Unit will carry on for long with its laborious card indexes when it has a computer terminal at its elbow.
The introduction of computerized information processing has a major impact on policing at ground level. The job specification of an area constable in Lothian and Borders Police (which acquired one of the first Criminal Information Systems) includes this:
“He/she should: (a) secure the services of at least one observer in every street, not a paid professional informant, but someone who knows the inhabitants and is inquisitive enough to find out what is going on and who is willing to pass on such information gained: ….His/her effectiveness will to some degree be judged by the amount of information he/she feeds to the records of local crime intelligence.” (11)
And while the increasing stress on intelligence gathering was taking place in the 1970s before the introduction of computer-based information handling, only with the computer’s assistance can this kind of intensive information gathering be usefully handled.
On Humberside, after a flurry of anxiety within the Labour Party, the Humberside Police Committee awoke briefly from its slumbers, and asked the Chief Constable to produce the Operational Requirements of the system. He refused, instead offering them a lecture on the system by one of the officers involved in its development. This they accepted.
The campaign on Humberside has been made possible by the unprecedented actions of the Merseyside Police Committee which used its powers of financial approval of police expenditure to block Merseyside Police’s computer plans. The Committee refused to fund either a crime reporting or a criminal intelligence software package, and forced the police to accept a number of safeguards on the use of the system. (12) This amounted to a de facto extension of the powers of the Police Committee under the 1964 Police Act. (13) Unfortunately the safeguards Merseyside insisted on will become illegal under the Data Protection Bill, and the Merseyside Police will be rid of their troublesome Police Committee when that tier of local government is abolished by the government.
Legislation on its way through Parliament will greatly increase police access to other data banks. The Police and Criminal Evidence Bill will allow the police to seize information on other computers. And any information transferred to police computers can become exempted from the (minimal) safeguards and rights of access provided for under the Data Protection Bill. (14)
At the back of all the (rational) paranoia of those interested in civil liberties is the spectre of the national police computer network. This isn’t with us yet, but the signs are there.
“All criminal records in Scotland, at present filed on paper, are to be put into a central computer system…the new system will be linked to the 8 Scottish forces’ computers and to the Police National Computer in Hendon.” (15)
By the early 1990s when all the English and Welsh forces have their Criminal Information Systems, and they’re all linked to the Police National Computer, something very much akin to a national computer system, with the PNC at its hub, will be a reality. (16)
NOTES
- The Police Use of Computers by Chris Pounder and Stuart Anderson. Available from TAGS,100 Findhorn Place, Edinburgh. Last I heard there were a few copies (at £2) still available. Privacy In The Computer Age by G. L. Simmons (Manchester 1982)I have had the advantage of a look at some forthcoming papers by Chris Pounder and a draft of a couple of chapters of the book he is writing on this subject. The misinterpretations, of course, are my own.
- A good general account of this is Andrew Lawrence in Datalink 5th December 1983. On the problems police computers are causing the software companies, see Lawrence in Datalink 4th July 1983.
- Report by Chief Constable of Humberside in Agenda for Humberside Police Committee 19th December 1983.
- An example of that police autonomy is in the Lawrence story of 4th July (see note 2 above)
- Figures from Police Powers and Politics, reviewed below, Chapter 3.
- This quote could even be read as suggesting that PNC enquiries are the core of the intelligence system. And maybe they are: Humberside Police make more than 1000 per day to the PNC.
- This description is reproduced from the Association of Chief Police Officers’ The Police Use of Computers. The book (if it is a book: we’ve never seen the whole thing) is not available to the public. We obtained a couple of pages.
- Chris Pounder Data Protection, Criminal Information Computers and the UK Police forthcoming in CILIP, a West German civil liberties journal.
- Policing London April/May 1983 p11
- Police Powers (see note 5) p80
- Police Powers (see note 5) p288
- This very important event was absurdly underreported at the time. See Times 29th April 1983 and Computer Weekly 9th December 1983.
- Discussed at length in State Research No 31. For a general account of police accountability see Police Powers (see note 5). For the views of Merseyside’s Police Committee Chairperson, Margaret Simey, see her essay in Policing The Riots ed. Cowell, Jones and Young. (Junction Books, London 1982)
- This is discussed in a paper forthcoming in Computing . I have ripped off and severely abbreviated a section of that paper here.
- See Times 16th August 1983
- There is an excellent drawing of what this system will look like in Lawrence (see note 2 above, first reference)
The Policing Revolution: Police Technology, Democracy and Liberty in Britain
Sarah Manwaring-White (Harvester Press, Brighton 1983)
Is very good, is this. In 220 pages the author manages to combine a history of the British Police, a survey of its current technology, and some of the uses to which it has been put recently. The density of the information and the author’s brisk style give the reader a fairly hair-raising gallop through the development and present day reality of our computer-based techno-police. It’s rather like reading all the scary bits from the whole of State Research at one sitting.
There’s a little too much attention paid to the minutiae of some of it. There’s this, for example, in a page devoted to police revolvers:
“A revolver is a handgun in which a series of barrels, or a cylinder with a series of chambers bored centrally through it, revolve around a central axis. Each barrel or chamber can be activated by the firing mechanism in turn.”
Yes, well I think we knew that already, didn’t we? And there’s a quite pointless skim across the surface of police forensics. But this is quibbling. Her intention was a comprehensive survey – hence a discussion of police revolvers – and that, as far as I am able to tell, is what this is.
Incredibly, Harvester Press haven’t seen fit to provide us with an index.
Police Powers and Politics
Robert Baldwin and Richard Kinsey (Quartet 1982)
Police Powers and Politics by Robert Baldwin and Richard Kinsey (Quartet 1982) has a different focus. Where Manwaring-White surveys current police practice primarily through the development of police technology (surveillance, information handling, weaponry etc.), Baldwin and Kinsey produce a critical look at British policing via sociological observation of a particular (but unnamed) police force. I think this book is going to have a considerable impact on critical thinking about the police, though not, perhaps, in the way the authors may have hoped.
They use their study as a back-drop for a wide-ranging survey whose scope can be seen from the chapter headings of what follows the research section. The bits in brackets are mine, by the way. The Local Politics of Accountability (Police Committees, their impotence, complaints against the police, their handling); The Police and The Law (their account of an incredible muddle); Reforming The Law or Legalizing Abuse (political machinations leading up to the formation of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure which produced the Criminal Evidence Bill); The Poverty of the Royal Commission; Community Policing and Scarman On The Riots (critiques of both).
These chapters seem to me (no expert) to be extremely useful and clear guides through the legislative and political manoeuverings of recent years. But I suspect that what will be fastened on is their chapter on local intelligence gathering. For by showing us how local police intelligence gathering actually works in one force they have blown the gaff on one of the Police’s major secrets. This chapter is too complex to be summarised here, but at its core is the information that the force they studied held intelligence files on at least l0% of the population, and at least 50% of those files were on people without a criminal record. Perhaps it is over-stating things to call such intelligence gathering a ‘secret’; similar figures have emerged in the past. But it is certainly something the police are none too keen that the public should be aware of, and this is the longest and most explicit account that I am aware of.
Their analysis of so-called ‘community policing’ should thrust upon anyone who has gained the impression that ex Chief Constable (now SDP Parliamentary candidate) John Alderson’s regime in Devon and Cornwall was a ‘good thing’. The scale of police involvement in ‘community schemes’ and quasi-social work activities of one sort or another is only just beginning to emerge. In the December issue of the County Councils’ Gazette, for example, there is a brief (but enthusiastic) account of Staffordshire Police’s Activity and Community Enterprise for Youth scheme, in which 30,000 school children were brought under the police’s umbrella for the summer holidays of 1982. Similar police-initiated ‘community activities’ are starting up all over the country, apparently without any serious consideration of the implications of such an extension of the police’s role.
Kinsey and Baldwin note (p. 257) that
“Community policing is all very well when administered by a charismatic liberal but it could easily turn into a fearsome machine for surveillance if placed in the wrong hands.”
But they’ve got it wrong. Current policing, including ‘community policing’, as their research shows, is a ‘machine for surveillance’. So-called ‘community policing’ just extends the range of those under that surveillance. Humberside’s Chief Constable rather gives the game away when he describes the ‘Neighbourhood Constable’ (aka Community Policeman) as
“extremely effective barometers within the community, sensing changes of attitude and signs of disquiet and frustration. Also, because they are so well known they gather a great deal of information”. (Report for 1982)
It may be that ‘charismatic liberals’ (Alderson) will be able to run ‘community policing’ (ie surveillance/social control policing) without it becoming too conspicuous. But that is hardly the point, is it?
The opening sentence of Manwaring-White’s book is this:
“The development of the police force in Britain has always been, and still is, inextricably linked with the story of civil disturbance, protest and demonstration in this country.”
And the uncomfortable truth today is that when the sullen, passive, video-watching poor in this country get uppity next time, they’re going to be faced by a police force which is now (post Toxteth/Brixton) tooled-up, totally out of democratic control, ready (and probably raring) to go. Even on Humberside, politically and socially as docile an area as you could hope to find in this country, the police are now stocked up with the full range of hardware – CS gas, plastic bullets, pump-action shotguns, and God alone knows (because the Police Committee certainly don’t) what else.
These two books should be read together. Kinsey and Baldwin flunk the inference of their own research. Ms Manwaring-White looks it full in the face.
Robin Ramsay