IA Writing Assignment: Would the Ripper get away with it today?
With today’s advances in technology, would the Yorkshire Ripper have gotten away for so long?
Content Warning: the following description may be disturbing to some readers.
I have recently watched a Netflix true crime documentary show — ‘’ The Ripper’’. It is about the most notorious serial killer who was dubbed the ‘’Yorkshire Ripper’’ by the press in the 80s.
While I was watching the show, I was shocked to see how inefficient the police system was for gathering and organising information 40 years ago. When I got the written assignment on information architecture, my first thought was to look at the differences between the past and today’s tool used in sorting information and data.
Who is the ‘’Yorkshire Ripper’’?
From 1975, the killer Peter Sutcliffe actively attacked and murdered women in residential areas at night in north England. In these brutal crimes victims were often battered with a hammer, as well as being stabbed and mutilated with a knife or sharpened screwdriver.
Women were told to stay out of public spaces after dark, which triggered the movement ‘’Reclaim the Night ‘’ seeing marches across the city in response to the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders.
The amount of index cards has caused construction problems
Despite 2.5 million police man hours expended on catching him, the Yorkshire Ripper was allowed to continue his murderous spree for more than five years and had slipped through the police’s net on several occasions. He eventually attacked 20 women, killing 13 of them, between 1975 and 1980.
One of the issues led the case unsolved for so long was the sheer quantity of information that the police were unable to process. It began when they announced a national rewarding campaign which had successfully encouraged people to contact the Police with any clue that can possibly help track down the killer. All interviews and potential suspects were recorded manually on cards. The team got thousands of calls every week, and filed all the names that had been reported in alphabetical order. There were so many index cards filled in the cabinets the rooms holding these cards needed reinforced floors. And at the time there were no computers in the station to process the facts on these cards.
Could this have happened 10 years later?
Although the first microprocessor on the market was developed in 1971, it was not until the 80s that the home computer usage had slightly peaked up. Imagining if the murders happened 10 years later when the Microsoft Excel sheet had already been invented in 1985, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to sort these tips out by the technology.
By putting in suspects’ names and their personal details and filtering by different columns on Excel, it makes input and search existing information much easier! If it was today, the files could even be synced to Google drive which allows the team members to edit real-time whenever they have got useful tips.
Where’s the ‘’Yorkshire Ripper’’ now?
Being the biggest manhunt in Britain’s history, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was finally caught in 1981 and died of Covid-19 at 74 behind bars last year. When I was watching the documentary, it caught my attention towards the way people organised information 40 years ago, in contrast to how people deal with vast data nowadays.
