My friend and co-researcher Alan Wright, who has died aged 81, enjoyed more than 50 years as a criminal justice practitioner and philosopher. He served for a quarter of a century in the Metropolitan police in London, then completed more than 25 years as an academic and independent scholar.
As a detective sergeant at New Scotland Yard in 1967, he was posted to a new inquiry into the activities of the Kray gang; he was to become the longest serving detective on the case through to their conviction in 1969. When asked what he said to them at their arrest, Alan replied: “Ronnie and Reggie, get in the van.” Their response went unrecorded.
Born in Stanmore, north-west London, the son of Percival, a grocer, and Grace (nee Hills), a domestic servant, Alan was educated at Gillingham technical school for boys and began training as an actuary in 1958 after the death of both his parents.
The following year, gazing out of his central London office window, he concluded that a police officer walking the street below was having a better time of it than he was – and the next day began the process of joining the Metropolitan police service.
Once his training was complete, he was posted to West End Central police station as a patrol officer, covering the Mayfair and Soho beats and observing local gangsters at first-hand. On his police retirement in 1985 he had achieved the rank of chief superintendent and had received an impressive 12 commendations for his detective work.
In 1980, while still serving in the police, Alan had graduated from the University of Southampton with a degree in politics and philosophy, and thereafter he began to set himself up for an academic career.
He completed a PhD on political communication, also at Southampton, in 1989, and then became a senior research fellow in the Henry Fielding Centre for Police Studies and Crime-Risk Management at the University of Manchester. He moved on to be a senior lecturer at Staffordshire University, where I met him, in 1994, and then Portsmouth University, in 1998. He was awarded a visiting professorship by Birmingham City University in 2006.
Along the way Alan published three well-received books, including Organised Crime in 2006. In 2003-04 he worked on training programmes for investigators in the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct).
An advocate of pursuing hobbies to balance a busy work life, Alan collected pewter with his wife, Patricia (nee Blood) whom he had known since the late 1960s and married in 2002. He was an accomplished angler, sailor, bibliophile, MG enthusiast, keen golfer and connoisseur of malt whisky.
He is survived by Patricia, two sons, Andrew and Stephen, from his first marriage to Pat, which ended in divorce, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
