Twenty-first century computers can store limitless amounts of information and be programmed to draw links between seemingly unconnected facts in an intelligent way. Police forces around the world, like every other institution and business, are now utterly dependent on them. But in Hoban’s time there were no computers in which local intelligence could be stored. He and his detectives in a murder incident room relied on a card index system, with its complex classifications.
The Parliamentary Committee investigating the police service in 1919–20 was given a simple example where police officers knew how a particular criminal worked, but had no way of passing on the information. There was a burglar in Liverpool who regularly defecated in a corner in every house he broke into. This was known to detectives in the city but not outside Liverpool. How could they inform other forces and how could they communicate the information? ‘There is any amount of knowledge which is not available beyond the actual man who possesses it, or the actual police force which records it,’ a witness told the committee. ‘It is difficult to classify that sort of thing. Every police officer had this knowledge fifteen or sixteen years ago, and we tried to card it in Liverpool but we were up against another difficulty. We had many of these cards describing the methods followed by the particular criminal described on the card, but we had no system by which we could index them. So except for the personal memory of the man who prepared the cards, and he had a very good memory, the thing was valueless and we would not get out an index.’
The person who in 1909 solved this problem for Britain’s police was the then chief constable of the West Riding, Major-General L. W. Atcherley. He got the cooperation of all neighbouring county and borough forces and established a clearing house for information at his Wakefield HQ. In this way intelligence reports about the routes used by travelling thieves and swindlers were analysed. It was well known that thieves travelled to other towns to commit crimes and had long been doing so. In April 1853 three pickpockets from Leeds were arrested among a large crowd come to witness an execution at York Castle, along with numerous other petty thieves who had travelled from as far afield as Manchester and Yarmouth.
By a careful comparison of a modus operandi and a personal description of the criminal, a long list of undetected crimes committed by the same man in different police authorities could be cleared up. Different ways of committing crimes like larceny were broken down and filed separately. A handbook let an individual officer understand and use the system with little delay. He was taught the clues to look for. ‘Four years’ experience in the West Riding with its twenty-two divisions has proved the utility of this system and although the number of cases of reported crime in the county police area has increased by a third, the percentage of undetected crime is very low, and much less in proportion to what it used to be in former years,’ a report revealed immediately prior to the First World War.
The ‘peculiarity of method’, according to the 1920 Parliamentary Report, gave the policemen their clues to solving crime. ‘The leading feature of the Wakefield system which is proving its value against the modern travelling thief and swindler, is the investigation of crime through its methods. In the past, knowledge of this sort has remained far too much in the possession of this or that policeman or this or that police force … the clearing house is the machinery for the detection of crime.’ This prescient observation came to have real force more than sixty years later during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. The keeping of records, and how and where they were administered, was a key feature unrecognized during the prolonged murder hunt, and it had the most tragic results.
Of all the great institutions in Britain, the police service has been among the slowest to bring about radical reform. The prime reason has been the jealously guarded principle that police forces should be subject to control by local communities through watch committees. The argument raged for more than a hundred years. Bradford and Leeds successfully stayed out of the great amalgamation in 1968, only to be absorbed into the West Yorkshire force six years later. Historically, British police forces have been fiercely independent, even leading to arguments over whether the ‘office of constable’ was one subject to local or central control under the British constitution. Towns and boroughs fought to achieve the right to choose their own chief constable rather than have one imposed on them by government. Legislation to bring about reform was seen as interfering with their independent control over the organization and expenditure of the police force in their area.
When amalgamations were proposed, they often met with fierce resistance – not least in Yorkshire. The city of York mounted vigorous opposition to legislation which would have amalgamated forces in the 1850s, provided money from the Treasury for efficient forces, and set up a system of inspections. York also opposed Palmerston’s Police Bill, fearing ‘the police would become a standing army entrusted with powers unheard of in the darkest ages of tyranny’. The York Herald proclaimed: ‘To surrender up the control of the police to the executive government would be an act of folly which every lover of constitutional liberty ought to do all in his power to prevent.’ County magistrates and local watch committees would become mere puppets: ‘Local control of policing which allowed local communities to decide which form of policing best suited them would disappear.’
In 1920 Parliament heard arguments pleading for police forces to be banded together if they were to become more efficient. Forty-eight police forces had less than twenty-five men in their ranks and forty forces had less than fifty officers. The boroughs of Louth and Tiverton consisted of a chief constable, two sergeants and eight constables; total strength: eleven men. Bigger forces meant better administration, training and the chance for individual officers to gain wider experience.
Amalgamations were still high on the agenda when the Royal Commission on the Police reported in 1962. So was the question of the educational standards of men being recruited into the police service. The 1920 Parliamentary Committee had found the system lacking in this respect; so did the Report of the Royal Commission. ‘We have come across no recent instance of a university graduate entering the service, only about 1 per cent of recruits have two or more GCE A levels, a further 10 per cent have five subjects or more at O level and an additional 20 per cent have one to four O levels.’ The report strongly criticized the police service for failing to recruit anything like its proper share of able, well-educated young men. The commissioners’ principal concern was being able to attract sufficient recruits who would make good chief constables fifteen or twenty years hence. This without question remained a problem for the British police force for generations. ‘They preferred to educate the recruited rather than recruit the educated,’ said one senior detective, closely involved in the Yorkshire Ripper case, who had himself given up a university place to get married and join the police force.
Absence of a grammar school or university education had not proved a barrier to men like Hoban, who had left school aged fourteen with no qualifications, joined the Leeds City Police aged twenty-one, and in 1960 become the force’s youngest detective inspector. He achieved promotion on grounds of merit and consistent hard work. The police force in Leeds which Dennis Hoban joined in 1947 after wartime service in the Royal Navy aboard motor torpedo boats had hardly changed in technological terms since Edwardian times. They still carried whistles to draw attention. It was only in 1930 that the city police got its own motor patrol section and even then it consisted of one motor car, one three-wheeled vehicle, two motorcycle combinations and a solo motorcycle. For years bicycles provided the extra mobility for the forces of law and order in their everyday fight against crime.
Leeds got its first police boxes containing a telephone in 1931, and these were the mainstay of communication with officers on the beat until the 1950s, when they were replaced by telephones in pillars. Communication between police stations and headquarters was by wireless. In 1955, by which time Hoban was a fully fledged plain-clothes detective, thirty-three police cars in the city were fitted with radios, but it was to be another ten years before individual personal radio sets were issued to officers. In the mid-1950s, Leeds had had plain-clothes detectives for a hundred years, but specialization within the town’s CID did not emerge until the 1960s, with the setting up of crime squads, a drug squad in 1967 and a stolen vehicles squad in 1970. Hoban, in the early 1960s, took part in an experimental project involving