Criticism of West Yorkshire Police
West Yorkshire Police was criticised for being inadequately prepared for an investigation on this scale. It was one of the largest investigations by a British police force and pre-dated the use of computers. Information on suspects was stored on handwritten index cards. Aside from difficulties in storing and accessing the paperwork (the floor of the incident room was reinforced to cope with the weight of the paper), it was difficult for officers to overcome the information overload of such a large manual system. Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times, but all information the police had about the case was stored in paper form, making cross-referencing difficult compounded by television appeals for information which generated thousands more documents.
Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), George Oldfield, was criticised for being too focused on the "I'm Jack" Wearside tape and letters. The investigation used them as a point of elimination rather than a line of enquiry and allowed Sutcliffe to avoid scrutiny, as he did not fit the profile of the sender of the tape or letters. The Wearside Jack hoaxer was given unusual credibility when analysis of saliva on the envelopes he sent showed he had the same blood group as the Yorkshire Ripper had left at crime scenes, a type shared by only 6% of the population. The hoaxer appeared to know details of the murders which had not been released to the press but which he had acquired from his local newspaper and pub gossip. The official response to the criticisms led to the implementation of the forerunner of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, the development of the Major Incident Computer Application (MICA), developed between West Yorkshire Police and ISIS Computer Services.
In 1988, the mother of the last victim argued in court that police had failed to use reasonable care in apprehending the murderer of her daughter in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police 1988. The House of Lords held that the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire did not owe a duty of care to the mother.
Read more about this topic: Peter Sutcliffe
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