4 Managing police data: computers

Police forces were interested in the possibilities offered by computers from the outset. While electronic computers were in operation from the 1940s, early machines were very bulky, hard to programme and largely standalone (not integrated with other information systems). Nonetheless, by the late 1950s, the Metropolitan Police, the Prison Commission and the Home Office all saw the potential of computers and they formed the Joint Automatic Data Processing Unit (JADPU) to explore using them for large data processing tasks.

Figure 7: Almondsbury Motorway and Severn Bridge Control Room, 1970s [Description: A faded colour photograph showing a control room in the early 1970s with a desk and banks of computer screens of various designs and sizes; some are early desktop personal computers, others may be for CCTV. There is a large diagrammatic map on the wall of a road system with points that light up. There are also a number of keypads and consuls and bundles of papers on the desks.] Source: https://gloucestershirepolicearchives.org.uk/content/from-truncheons-to-tasers/control-rooms/almondsbury

In 1964 JADPU began the process of computerising aliens’ registers (the large books recording details of foreign citizens living in the UK). This led in turn to the creation of the Police and Aliens Record Computer (PARC). PARC was the first step towards a national policing computer system and by 1968 it was known as the Police National Computer project or PNC. Based at Hendon – the site of the National Police College – and aided by the arrival of networked systems, PNC1 went online in 1971 providing a direct and secure communications link to the headquarters of every police force in the UK.

Police functions related to traffic and motoring were among the first to be computerised (as in Figure 7) but the PNC soon contained searchable registers for missing and wanted persons, the criminal records index, and fingerprint register.

Further advances were made in later decades of the twentieth century. Some police cars were equipped with printers (able to receive instructions from a control room) and rudimentary touch screens able to indicate their location from as early as the late 1970s.

In the twenty first century, however, the police computer systems have come to be seen as outdated and inefficient. While there has been innovation around mobile devices, policing at times has struggled to match the investment in computer use which was evident in the mid/late twentieth century. A 2018 survey of police officers’ views on the IT which supported their work concluded: