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Helping police with their enquiries: international perspectives on homicide investigation

It remains one of the key paradoxes of policing studies that homicide investigation is one of the most publicly visible and concomitantly least understood aspects of the police function. When mass media discuss policing, it routinely occurs in relation to a story pivoting around an unexplained violent ‘murder’. And yet, this level of popular attention serves to obscure our overall understandings of how police respond to a sudden death, define it as being caused by some form of criminal act, identify and locate suspects and secure convictions. This is a point made elegantly by Brodeur (2010). He argues that empirical research on policing has tended to be dominated by studies of uniformed officers and the patrol function. It is a focus that has subtly configured and moulded some of the key ways in which policing has been conceptualised and theorised. Of course it would be inaccurate to say that there have not been any studies of the other aspects of policing. Indeed, this journal has very often taken the lead in publishing new empirical studies that have broadened our understandings of what it is that policing involves and how it is conducted across a range of social situations and settings. Relatedly, there have been a limited number of notable contributions of crime investigation generally, and the investigation of fatal violence more specifically. However, at an aggregate level both numerically and in terms of their influence upon the field of policing studies, these are overshadowed by the tendency to focus upon the work of uniformed patrol. As an alternative to this tendency, Brodeur (2010) advocates understanding ‘the policing web’ in as broad a manner as possible, including public and private policing, high and low policing and military policing and extra-legal policing. Approached in this manner, the work of crime investigation and the role of detectives is important because of how it forces us to re-think some of our key definitions of what policing is and how it is accomplished. Brodeur (2010) accents the point that detectives are not, following Bittner’s (1974) frequently invoked notion, engaged in the ‘emergency maintenance of social order’. This neglect of crime investigation, detectives and homicide investigation in the research literature, is attributable to a complex array of causes. Recently, a lot of scholarly attention has focused upon developments in community policing, counterterrorism and private policing. Certainly in respect of the former and latter, these are areas that are perhaps more easily accessible to researchers in terms of being able to conduct empirical research. The difficulties and sensitivities involved in trying to research murder investigations have been compounded by the fact that, from the point of view of police as an institution, homicide investigations are not necessarily the most pressing issues in terms of overall demand (except when things go publicly wrong). In the USA, for Policing & Society, 2013 Vol. 23, No. 3, 285–291, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2013.771542