Police voice fears over Holmes 2

Some of the UK's police forces have expressed concerns over Holmes 2, the police investigation management system, citing fears over the strength of authentication technology in the system.

Although defences against hackers are strong, the system does not afford the same level of protection against tampering from within.

Holmes 2 allows inter-police force networking and will help officers and criminologists to collate and analyse information. But some forces, including London's Metropolitan Police, are unwilling to allow other forces to tap into their databases unsupervised.

Designed by Unisys, the technology uses Windows NT at the client side and XPG4-compliant Unix on application and database servers. Doug Stuckey, director of Unisys' public sector division, said that, in conjunction with the Police IT Organisation (PITO), he would "work to resolve these issues".

Ken Grange, project manager for Holmes 2, and a former detective superintendent, explained why the new system was needed. "Holmes was a good system but it involved four different suppliers so integrating information with other forces was not always as simple as it could have been.

"The Association of Chief Police Officers wanted a system that allowed investigation teams, including officers and analysts, to make more meaningful use of data.

"As investigations become more sophisticated the volume of data increases. We know that many officers draw diagrams to help them see the wood for the trees, so we added graphical representation abilities to the system," he said.

Holmes 2 the original network system developed after the deeply flawed Yorkshire Ripper investigation in which murderer Peter Sutcliffe evaded capture despite being questioned repeatedly. Vital links in evidence were missed by the laborious and antiquated paper filing system.

Of the 51 forces in England, Wales and Scotland, PITO has 23 Holmes 2 systems installed and hopes to increase this to 36 by March 2001.

The system runs on Windows 2000, which reduces the need for staff to be retrained. It can also be run on Solaris and AIX systems, suiting the range of forces' operating systems and infrastructures.