A rushed programme to upgrade Humberside Police's computers
in time for the millennium bug may have led to the loss of critical
intelligence reports on child murderer Ian
Huntley.
Documents submitted to the Bichard Inquiry last week showed that
the upgrade programme left the force with intelligence systems that
were still inadequate and a source of frustration two years after
the project's completion.
The revelations follow disclosures by Humberside's chief constable
David Westwood that Humberside Police had been forced to delete
intelligence data on Huntley to comply with the Data Protection
Act.
An intelligence systems review by detective superintendent Keith
Hunter in October 2002 released to the inquiry revealed that the
replacement intelligence system, dubbed CIS2, was "hasty,
under-researched and under-funded".
Its introduction led to the loss of "a huge amount of potentially
important intelligence and information" and had lost the confidence
of the user community two years after its installation.
The net result, according to the report, was that the force had a
database that "did not nearly meet user requirements" and "did not
fulfil its role as the central, reliable storehouse of all
available intelligence".
The report revealed that Humberside Police had no mechanism for
collating the intelligence held about individuals on its 26
databases, without trawling each one individually.
The report casts doubt on the ability of Humberside Police to
comply with the Data Protection Act. There were no written policies
for entry or weeding of data on a significant number of the
databases - an omission that Hunter described as
"indefensible".
"The inability to ascertain what information we may once have held
and what information we may have passed on when the murder suspect
was vetted could have led to some damaging publicity," said
Hunter.
"More serious was the possibility that the systems operated by this
police force could have contributed to a situation in which the
suspect was allowed to take up the position of caretaker at the
school were he worked."