One well-quoted example is the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who was apprehended thanks to the vigilance of a beat police officer who noticed the false plates on the car he was driving. The officer pulled the car over, opened the boot, saw the hammer, and brought an end to the biggest police manhunt in recent history.

Similarly, Dick Turpin, the infamous highwayman, was caught stealing a horse. His true identity was only revealed when a prison guard read a letter Turpin had written to his brother. The letter read along the lines of ‘thank God they don’t know who I am’. ‘They’ soon did, and he was hanged for his crimes which included murder. In both cases, these notoriously serious offenders drew attention to their serious crimes by committing rather minor offences; they ‘self-selected’.

Recent research into ‘criminal careers’ supports the idea that more serious offenders also commit minor offences. Put another way, ‘People who do big bad things, also do little bad things’ (Jones and Pease 2004). This is the notion of the versatile offender, and the most serious offenders are often the most versatile. If we can identify those ‘little bad things’ (minor offences) which help us to identify the possibility of ‘big bad things’ (serious offences), it will have considerable implications for the identification and detection of serious offenders.

Until recently research to substantiate a link between serious and minor offending has been lacking, and the idea that serious offenders might identify themselves by committing minor infractions of the law has remained an unsubstantiated ‘hunch’. Consequently, the immense contribution that can be made by identifying minor offences, which can be used as indicators of more serious offending, has remained relatively neglected. Its importance has been missed or considered unworthy of comprehensive implementation into mainstream policing.

But there is evidence to support the serious-minor offence link, and to highlight the importance of this approach in identifying and detecting serious offenders.
In committing minor offences, serious offenders offer themselves up for police attention. By self-selecting, offenders identify themselves as warranting further legitimate police scrutiny, which should uncover more serious offending if it exists.

Grounds for harassment are minimised because the offender has volunteered himself or herself for police attention by committing an offence, however minor it might be.
If we can discover which minor offences serve as the best indicators for more possible serious offending, it will offer an additional way of identifying and detecting serious offenders. However, although the concept of offender self-selection is seemingly simple and intuitive, it proves a little more problematic in practice.

Firstly, we need to identify those minor offences that serve as reliable indicators for more serious offending from the multitude of possible less serious law infractions. Recent research has identified several minor offence types as a starting point:

n Research into illegal parking in disabled bays in Huddersfield found that a significant number of people who committed this offence had offending histories and/or outstanding warrants for the arrest of the registered keepers of the vehicles (Chenery, Henshaw and Pease 1999).

n Research focusing on the criminal histories of serious traffic offenders found that those committing these offences repeatedly were most likely to commit mainstream offences as well; for example, drink drivers are twice as likely to have a crimina