HOLMES 2
database of the United Kingdom government for major crimes
HOLMES 2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) is an information technology system that is predominantly used by UK police forces for the investigation of major incidents such as serial murders and high-value frauds.
The system is a single application which was developed by Unisys and McDonnell Douglas Information Systems (in competition, not co-operation) for the Police Information Technology Organisation under a private finance initiative. It provides total compatibility and consistency between all the police forces of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as the Royal Military Police. The name of the system is a reference to the fictional Arthur Conan Doyle private detective character Sherlock Holmes.
History of development
HOLMES
HOLMES was introduced in 1985 and enabled law enforcement agencies to improve effectiveness and productivity in crime investigations. Like the later HOLMES 2, it was an administrative support system that was primarily designed to assist senior investigation officers in their management of the complexity of investigating serious crime.
HOLMES was also used to support the Police UK Casualty Bureau providing facilities to record reported missing persons, casualties, survivors and evacuees. The application provides matching facilities to aid the reconciliation of missing persons with those involved in the incident.
The system had crucial weaknesses, too. It provided very little support to the investigation of the crime in itself and had only very limited opportunities to link separate incidents, especially across police force boundaries.
“HOLMES 2” enters the record as database of the United Kingdom government for major crimes. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what HOLMES, database and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“HOLMES 2” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, HOLMES, database and United provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1259235. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “HOLMES 2” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.