Handbook of Criminal Investigation

Tim Newburn, Tom Williamson, Alan Wright, Tim Newburn, Tom Williamson, Alan Wright

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136308239
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the most comprehensive and authoritative book yet published on the subject of criminal investigation, a rapidly developing area within the police and other law enforcement agencies, and an important sub discipline within police studies.

The subject is rarely out of the headlines, and there is widespread media interest in criminal investigation. Within the police rapid strides are being made in the direction of professionalizing the criminal investigation process, and it has been a particular focus as a means of improving police performance. A number of important reports have been published in the last few years, highlighting the importance of the criminal investigation process not only to the work of the police but to public confidence in this. Each of these reports has identified shortcomings in the way criminal investigations have been conducted, and has made recommendations for improvement .

The Handbook of Criminal Investigation provides a rigorous and critical approach to not only the process of criminal investigation, but also the context in which this takes place, the theory underlying it, and the variety of factors which influence approaches to it. It will be an indispensable source of reference for anybody with an interest in, and needing to know about, criminal investigation. Contributors to the book are drawn from both practitioners in the field and academics.

Chapter 1

Understanding Investigation

Tim Newburn

Understanding investigation

The police have many functions and responsibilities. Indeed, understanding the balance between these has led to considerable academic debate. For many commentators the core function of the police is the maintenance of order. Others point to the role of police forces as ‘secret social services’. In the public mind, however, in addition to the provision of reassurance, it is undoubtedly the case that it is the prevention, investigation and detection of crime that is seen as the central part of the police mandate. Interestingly, crime investigation has not generally been a subject of significant academic scrutiny. That is beginning to change, however, and in this volume we examine the history, theory, policy and practice of investigation. As with all areas of policing, however, it is important to understand these activities in their broader institutional and social context.

It is now commonplace to observe that policing is changing markedly just as the world being policed is itself being transformed. The fact that such an observation is fast taking on the character of a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. A number of important and fairly rapid changes have been affecting the structure and nature of British policing in recent decades. First, quite clearly for the bulk of the postwar period crime has been on the rise. That crime has fallen in the last decade doesn’t mask the fact that over a longer time period the overall direction of change has been towards much higher levels of crime, affecting all communities. Secondly, ease of transportation and communication has changed the character of at least some criminal activity. Although much crime is still committed by local people within their own or neighbouring communities, there is an important strand of criminal activity that involves significant mobility – of people and goods – with important implications for how such activity is policed. For example, the creation by the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005 of the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), which became operational in 2006, is a significant departure from the traditional policing structure in England and Wales. SOCA is charged by s. 2 of the Act with ‘preventing and detecting serious crime’, but also to ‘contributing to the reduction of such crime in other ways and to the mitigation of its consequences’. Thus, from its inception it has been working to a different paradigm of investigation from either its predecessor organizations or police forces, and this new paradigm is expected to be better able to meet the crime challenge emanating from the changes in transportation and communication.

Like the whole of the crime control arena, the last 30 years have seen a remarkable politicization of policing. The emergence of a ‘law and order’ ideology has been particularly marked in neoliberal political economies such as the UK (Cavadino and Dignan 2006), as political parties compete to demonstrate their policies are the toughest on crime. By pushing law and order further up the political agenda, politicians have become more involved in the management of policing structures and resources. These political changes also forced a change in the function of policy-makers from their traditional distantiated role as Platonic guardians (Loader 2006) to a much more hands-on service delivery function. This meant that police organization, police pay and police performance are all matters on which politicians regularly offer views and around which they frequently seek to make political capital, with officials being tasked to drive through the subsequent political reforms. Finally, this process increased the gradual centralization of policing, which has been underway ever since formal police forces first covered the whole of England and Wales, and that has gathered considerable pace in the last 30 years or so.

Within policing, there has been a gradual shift in which increasing emphasis has been placed on crime control. All the classic studies in the sociology of policing observed, in their different ways, that the core functions of policing included the maintenance of order, the investigation, detection and prevention of crime, and a host of other ‘service’ tasks. This interest in policing coincided with the gradual emergence of the managerialist agenda of the 1980s and 1990s that took hold as government politicians sought to increase their oversight of all public services, including the police. This ostensibly enabled them to ask questions of how public money was being spent and, crucially, whether value for money was being achieved. Over time, there developed an increasing sense that politicians were less and less impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness of the British police service. This, combined with the general politicization of ‘law and order’, led the government increasingly to identify crime reduction as the number-one priority for the police. Crime control has become progressively defined as the key task in policing. Over the last decade and a half significant effort has been devoted to exploring organizational and technological means for improving police performance in this area. All aspects of policing, including investigatory capacities and techniques, have been affected by this shift with significant government investment in forensics, such as DNA testing and in improving the connectivity of information and communication technology, between forces and agencies.

The introduction of the New Police in the early nineteenth century was accompanied by considerable public scepticism and resistance. In persuading a reluctant Parliament and public, Peel and the other architects of the British police sought to design an institution that was obviously dissimilar in important respects from the military, or the gendarmerie model that Wellington had previously created in the Royal Irish Constabulary which was designed to pacify a largely indigent Catholic population and which became the model for colonial policing throughout the British Empire. Significantly, Peel also saw the need to differentiate the New Police from the continental model of policing that involved agents provocateurs and informers. As a consequence, the development of an investigative capability was eschewed in favour of patrol and it was some time before a formal criminal investigation function and department were created with grudging approval from the Home Secretary. From the 1870s, when criminal investigation was first fully established, this element of policing spread rapidly. Moreover, the development of this function was accompanied by stringent efforts by police managers to portray such work as requiring particular forms of expertise and to secure criminal investigation departments a degree of autonomy from their uniformed peers. In many respects such endeavours were highly successful for, by the mid-twentieth century, a certain cachet or glamour attached to plain-clothes work within the police service, however misleading the notion of detective ‘expertise’ may really have been.

Over time, a stereotypical picture of police detective work has built up. Maguire (2003: 367) suggests that the typical popular portrayal of such work contains the following six assumptions:

1 That it is ‘reactive’ (i.e. that the police respond to a crime complaint from the public rather than generate the investigation themselves).

2 That it is focused on an offence which has already taken place.

3 That the offence which is being investigated is clear from the outset.

4 That the inquiries are geared to uncovering the ‘truth’ about what happened.

5 That it is carried out by detective (CID) officers.

6 That the main investigative skills lie in discovering and interpreting ‘clues’ to find out ‘who did it’.

He then goes on to note that, while it is perfectly possible to find cases that adhere to this general pattern, in practice day-to-day investigative work is very different. It is different for some of the following reasons. First, the vast majority of investigative work is ‘suspect centred’. That is to say, it involves the surveillance of, and collection of intelligence on, what are sometimes euphemistically referred to as the ‘usual suspects’ and then working to link them to existing criminal activity. Secondly, there is a critical standpoint which views with great scepticism the claim that investigative work is focused on the search for the ‘truth’ and, by contrast, argues that it is more about constructing successful cases against known offenders leading to convictions (Sanders and Young 2003). Thirdly, and increasingly, there is a strand of investigative activity that is better thought of as proactive than reactive. There is growing emphasis upon the use of covert surveillance, informants and the like in contemporary investigative practice. Indeed, the overt aim of the National Intelligence Model – which aims to promote such activities – is precisely to alter the nature of police activity and to make it less reactive and less influenced by the latest event or ‘crisis’.

Historically, criminal investigation has been organized in three main ways: primarily, into specific criminal investigation departments; into specialist squads such as robbery teams or squads focusing on particular problems such as organized crime; and, finally, into major inquiry teams set up in response to particularly significant events. Though there have been many notable successes, the history of criminal investigation in British policing has also come in for some extremely serious criticism. Indeed, and particularly since the 1970s, it has been regularly beset by scandal. The scandals have come in a number of forms, but have focused primarily upon allegations of corruption (not least in some serious crime squad in the Metropolitan Police in the 1960s and 1970s); some significant abuses of power leading to miscarriages of justice (particularly around the wrongful convictions of people accused of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s); and more general incompetence (in the investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper case in the 1980s and the Soham murders leading to the Bichard Inquiry in 2005) and institutional racism (for example, in connection with the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s).

Such scandals, together with a more pervasive sense that policing generally, and criminal investigation more particularly, was not especially efficient, have led to growing calls for reform. Initially – from the early 1980s – attempts at increasing police effectiveness focused on tighter managerial controls, greater external (government) scrutiny and tighter legislative control (via the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984). Progressively, attention turned to what became known as ‘crime management’ and to the idea that such work could be managed more proactively, that crimes could be allocated to different categories according to their seriousness and the likelihood of clear-up (a form of policing ‘triage’) and that new methods could be found to increase effectiveness. As in so many areas of policing at the time, the Audit Commission were particularly influential. Their (1993) report, Helping with Enquiries: Tackling Crime Effectively, was highly critical of traditional case-based methods of inquiry and prompted the police to think more proactively, across cases, and to use forensic evidence and other intelligence in a more strategic manner.

The long-term outcome of this general pressure to increase efficiency and work more strategically has been the emergence, via the idea of intelligence-led policing (Tilley 2003), of the National Intelligence Model (NIM). Launched by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2000, NIM was endorsed by government and, according to the National Policing Plan, was to be ‘adopted by ALL forces to commonly accepted standards’. NIM is expected to work at three levels: basic command unit, force/regional and national/international in relation to serious and organized crime. It is described by at least some of its proponents as a ‘business model’, designed to enable police managers to allocate resources and, at its heart, is the aim of gathering and using ‘intelligence’ in a structured manner in relation to strategies, tactics, problems and targets. As such it shares certain characteristics with ‘problem-oriented policing’ though, arguably, should, if put into practice effectively, be more wide ranging in its impact. As with so many initiatives in policing, the key word here is implementation. It remains early days for NIM and, while there appears to be considerable commitment to the model, there is still a very long way to go before it can be claimed that it has been embedded successfully within the police service (Maguire and John 2004). The Human Rights Act 1998 meant that the intrusive surveillance the police had traditionally conducted as part of their intelligence gathering would in future be unlawful, and this led to the enactment of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 (as amended) which provided a framework for the interception of communications, surveillance and the use of covert human intelligence sources with regulation being provided by RIPA commissioners. Codes of practice are issued under the Act which has brought about the codification of aspects of best intelligence practice. One result of the legislation is to extend the remit of surveillance beyond the police and, currently, besides the 43 police forces in England and Wales, there are over 900 agencies that are now the beneficiaries of RIPA powers.

Studying investigation

In contrast to the subdiscipline of police studies which is now well established within British criminology, there has been relatively little systematic research by sociologists, criminologists and social psychologists into how criminal investigations are conducted. This is surprising for a number of reasons. First, criminal investigation is a staple of literary fiction and other media. From Sherlock Holmes through to modern-day bestsellers like Ian Rankin, Patricia Cornwell and P.D. James, criminal investigation fills bookshelves across the country. Relatedly, criminal investigation has been central to television portrayals of the police. Although a beat cop, and later a sergeant, George Dixon remains the apogee of television representations of British policing. Since the days of Dixon, however, some of the most famous TV cop programmes have focused on criminal investigation. Softly, Softly, The Sweeney (portraying a fictionalized flying squad) and even a significant element of The Bill all focus on the activities of the CID. In the USA the focus is even clearer, with Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, among many others, built around the lives of US detectives. The role of forensics has become a more recent genre, with television programmes like CSI proving to be immensely popular. Beyond popular portrayals, criminal investigation has also been the subject of considerable public and political attention, not least because of two Royal Commissions since 1980 as well as the very high levels of publicity attracted by a number of miscarriage of justice cases. In addition, there have been a number of more recent high-profile government inquiries such as those carried out by Lord Macpherson of Cluny into the death of Stephen Lawrence and by Lord Laming into the death of Victoria Climbie. Each of these reports has identified shortcomings in the way criminal investigations have been conducted and has made recommendations for improvement.

Despite the relative absence of academic scrutiny in this area, the study of criminal investigation is increasing in higher education institutions. Within the last decade, a number of centres have been established in universities to provide higher educational qualifications in investigation-related subjects. A Foundation Degree in Investigation and Evidence is now available. In mainstream criminology courses, students are beginning to take modules on criminal investigation as part of their studies. This will frequently take the form of one module and will cover the history of investigation, the structure of investigations, legal and technological changes in investigation, corruption, regulation and growth in professionalism.

Moreover, as we implied in the discussion of NIM earlier, there is a process of ‘professionalization’ going on in relation to investigation within the police service itself. ACPO launched a new training and development programme in late 2005 with the aim of enhancing the skills of investigatory officers and indeed all staff involved in such work. Such professionalization has developed only recently within the police service, partly because it is only relatively recently that criminal investigation has been viewed as in any way separate from other policing skills (even though CIDs have existed for over a century). A combination of legal and technical changes affecting the context and practice of investigation, together with a broader set of concerns about police effectiveness, including in criminal investigation, have brought this latest change about. The desire to stimulate greater professionalism has been supported by the creation of job descriptions and occupational standards covering all investigative roles. The end product has been the Professionalizing Investigation Programme (PIP), established by the Home Office and ACPO. According to its organizers, it has the key objective of:

achieving professionalism in investigation across the complete spectrum of the investigative process. PIP includes an end to end National Learning and Development Programme designed to provide a career pathway for investigators and develop skills in investigation within the Police Service.

PIP incorporates training, workplace assessment and ultimately registration for all existing and new to role investigators. The programme draws on the Practice Advice contained within Core Investigative Doctrine and is underpinned by the investigation and interviewing units contained within the National Occupational Standards developed by Skills for Justice.

National training programmes with investigative elements have been designed to support PIP and to accurately reflect the levels of complexity at which investigators are expected to operate. (http://www.deliveringchange.org/faq.asp).

The consequence has been the development of an accreditation programme and the introduction of continuous professional development aimed at officers at all levels and police service staff involved in criminal investigation. Indeed, the need to consolidate knowledge and understanding about criminal investigation has been further recognized by central government. In 2006 the Home Office announced the establishment of a National Policing Improvement Agency (NP...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Understanding Investigation
• Part 1 Criminal investigation in context
• Part 2 Organization of criminal investigation
• Part 3 Forensic techniques
• Part 4 Investigative sources and processes
• Part 5 Governance of criminal investigation
• Glossary
• Index