Introduction
Contemporary detectives are information processors who investigate, define, clear, and otherwise manage the tension between ”the case” as their property (Ericson 1981/ 1991) and the case as an organizational object of concern. The first work is constrained by rules and the second varies by the type of case or detecting involved. The process of managing the case within the organization may involve how to document it, what relations with other units are required (for example, concerning handling informants or ”deals” made with the suspect). Detectives investigate reported incidents that may be founded or established as crimes, instigate crime by making it happen (vice, drugs, internal affairs), take cases to court if required, process arrested prisoners, and attempt to clear founded crimes. To do this, they may interview suspects, witnesses, and victims; interrogate citizens (interview intensively with the purpose of extracting a confession or revelation); gather evidence; visit crime scenes; process forms (the disliked paperwork); carefully track or observe citizens or their communications; and clear, solve, or otherwise close cases. They make numerous phone calls. In recent years in the United States and the United Kingdom there has been more pressure to develop informants and to be concerned with homeland security. While carrying out these functions, the modern detective, at best, is a careful and skillful bureaucrat who fits the organizational demands to ”produce” (clear cases) with career aims and the extant detective (occupational) culture. As Ericson (1993, 213) observes dryly, while this process was designed to meet the needs of the citizenry and sometimes does, it does well ”. . . meet the needs of the detectives, facilitating their working designs.” There are at least four sorts of local, city, or state detective work: general investigation (Ericson 1993); vice/drugs (Manning 1989); homicide (Innes 2000; Simon 1991); and political intelligence (Brodeur 1999; Marx 1981). Much more is known about local general investigation and homicide operatives than about those in other specialized investigative work, and we know almost nothing about federal investigators (forty-three U.S. federal agencies do investigations, and there is little known about the workings of the FBI and the investigators attached to the services, for example, nor about those attached to the congressional, court, and executive branches of the federal government) and private investigators. This suggests that as in most other matters, the knowledge social scientists possess is inversely related to the power, status, and authority of the segment or subgroup studied, both within and across occupations.
Historical Perspective
While crime detection as a social function has been known since the sixteenth century in England, it was in the middle of the eighteenth that it became a socially organized, state-based role. Even at that time, detection of villains was a mixed public/private activity with fees, rewards, and paid private investigations entwined with public policing. It was not until 1878 that private fees as a supplement to a police salary were abandoned in London (Kuykendall 1986, 177). It is important to note that it was assumed that the burden of detection and identification was an obligation of the citizen, not the state. This collective burden for investigating serious crime, especially murder, was not assumed by the state until the late nineteenth century in the United Kingdom (Kuykendall 1986, 178). The resistance to public police detectives was very strong in the United Kingdom and less so in the United States. This was rooted in a concern for privacy, the corruption potential of such work, and its alliance with thieves, associations that have haunted detectives since (see Kuykendall 1986, 175, for a summary).
The transition to public policing began in the late 1840s in the United States (Johnson 1979, 48-50). The impetus was not only the rising crime figures but concerns that entrepreneurship and public duties were in some conflict. Also encouraging the transition were the development of the insurance industry, techniques used by private detectives, and perhaps a shift to crime control concerns rather than prevention via citizens’ mobilization of the reaction. This mixture of control modes remains in the Anglo-American world, where private detectives, the private security industry, and public police may investigate crimes against persons or property, but only public police can enter a case into the criminal justice system as police.
Kuykendall (1986, 179-193) argues using ideal types that the detective role has evolved from a “secretive rogue” to an “inquisitor” and thence to a “clerk” or bureaucrat. The secretive rogue was an entrepreneur in league more with criminals than responsible citizens and is corrupt, venial, and inefficient. The inquisitor was an interrogator whose apex was in the early part of the twentieth century and whose skills lay in pressing suspects to confess or betray others. Solving crime was arrived at via confessions, betrayals, informants, and intense physical and psychological abuse.
The reform movements of the 1920s and 1930s brought new constraints, and the detective, according to Kuykendall, became a bureaucrat, a clerk, and a “paper pusher” in the mid-twentieth century. While they became no more efficient in clearing or solving crimes and more scientific investigation was urged by reformers, constraints of supervision, procedural innovations in criminal law, and the professionalism movement within policing did reshape detective work. The aim of reform, as with policing in general, was to create a clean-living, scientifically oriented, rational, competent, and incorruptible officer (Kuykendall 1986, 186), but the effort focused on control and restraint rather than improved capacity to influence and reduce crime. The general structural approach to criminal investigation has not changed, formal selection criteria for entry into detective work have not changed, and the role of detective work in reducing crime is unknown. There is some indication that female detectives experience the job differently, have innovative detection styles, and suffer different sources and kinds of stress.
Detectives Subculture
The role of the detective in contemporary police departments stands in contrast to the visible, well-known uniformed patrol officer, and the subculture of the detective differs as well. Ironically, of course, the detective is dependent upon the patrol officers’ acuity, memory, and reports for constructing a case. Patrol officers who want to “make detective” often cultivate detectives’ friendship and “hang around” the detective unit. The occupational culture of policing is shared by detectives. An occupational culture is a means for coping with the vicissitudes of the job: a reduced, selective, and task-based version of culture that includes history and traditions, etiquette and routines, rules, principles, and practices that serve to buffer practitioners from contacts with the public. The sources of the occupational culture are the repeated, routinized tasks incumbent on the members, a technology that is variously direct or indirect in its effects (mediated by the organizational structure within which the occupation is done), and the reflexive aspects of talking about the work.
The following are distinguishing features or hypotheses about this context:
• The detective works in plain clothes, not a uniform, and has considerably low visibility and high autonomy.
• The detective learns the job, following brief (generally a few weeks’) training, via apprenticeships and partnerships between junior and senior agents.
• The detective has flexible hours, guided by the individual’s energies and imagination, current caseload, and pressures to produce clearances for the particular shift or unit.
• The detective is generally paid more than a uniformed officer and has many opportunities for earning money via overtime through court appearances, longer hours approved by supervisors, and special investigations that may be required, such as for manhunts for escaped prisoners, ”moral panics” associated with a series of homicides, or crimes by or upon major political or social figures in the city.
• The workload is variable and the demand episodic. While most cases are simple, the demands associated with some cases are complex. The weighting of such cases with respect to workload and their political significance is not easily resolved and makes comparisons across organizations and cases difficult.
• Skill level varies among detectives, and the stratification system (vertical ranking by skill) within a unit is generally well known and shared.
• Detectives have higher status than patrol officers in the department, although SWAT units are also highly
respected because of their equipment, public respect, and visibility in media-covered occasions.
• There is a hierarchy within the detective world from homicide detectives to general investigators working primarily auto thefts and burglaries, a scale that reflects the importance attached to actually catching the villain.
• Cases present various degrees of ”trouble” in that victims, witnesses, and evidence can all be problematic to manage. Homicide cases are the most likely to produce media concern, pressure for solution, and paperwork tracking decisions made.
• Supervision is democratic and less rule-bound than in uniform patrol.
• The mode of selection of detectives, transfers in and out, as well as rank promotion within the unit are political, based on sponsorship and reputation more than on exam results, seniority, or even the selection interview. The networks of sponsorship extend outside the unit and may involve city politicians.
• Paperwork and interviewing skills are admired and required, even though paperwork is viewed ambivalently or disdained (see Manning 1980).
The detective subculture is omitted in conventional descriptions of the police occupational culture (Reiner 2000; Crank 1998). It is possible, however, to draw some generalizations about the work and its rewards, evaluative standards, values, and divisions.
The criteria and bases for selection vary across departments but generally include an interview, approval of the transfer, and a good reputation. Being chosen to be a detective requires personal skill, good interpersonal networks within the organization, or ”politics,” support from present detectives, and ”fit” with local traditions.
A detective soon has a network of informal power relations inside and outside the unit. The prestige of a detective rests in part upon the boundary spanning and networking work that is essential to carry out the job well. This “politicking” is necessary but is viewed ambivalently within the department. Selection to a unit signifies that the person has the potential to be trusted and loyal, a “team player,” and has investigative skills.
Status accrues as a result of accomplishing the possible with style, in a collegial and egalitarian organizational environment. This is mitigated by gender and ethnicity as factors in interaction and evaluation. Failure to carry the load, “ducking cases,” failing to clear conventional crimes, and adding to others’ workload all decrease a detective’s status with his peers. Rank or formal position is rarely used to define social relations (Corsianos 1999). The stratification and differentiation within detective units is greater than in the patrol division. Fine status distinctions based on skill and experience are observed in the work that is done in teams or collectively.
The values of detectives are shaped by the insulated position of the unit in the police organization. They are dependent on their investigative colleagues and to a lesser degree on the public but view themselves as independent operators, skilled artisans, and puzzle solvers. Detectives are much less threatened by rules, supervision, and public complaints than are patrol officers, so their autonomy is less salient, and collective obligations are emphasized. Their authority is rarely challenged except in court. To an important degree, detectives view the uncertainties they encounter as controllable.
The subculture of detectives is gender and ethnicity biased in dramatic fashion (Simon 1991; Martinez 1996; Corsianos 1999). Females, African Americans, and Latinos who are selected enter a white male world. This subcultural bias manifests itself in gossip about these officers being lazy, not being hustlers, being unable to clear cases. In Latino-based units, it is believed that Anglos cannot investigate cases properly because they cannot get people to talk with them, have no informants, and do not know African American or Latino neighborhoods (Martinez 1996). In Boston, for example, the clearance rate of below 35% in homicide cases in 2005 was at least in part attributable to the absence of experienced African American investigators and distrust of police in disadvantaged areas of the city. Where ethnicity divides the unit, racial stereotypes also shape the prestige of officers. A corollary of this is that sponsorship to the unit is difficult for those from stereotypic categories, and power shifts among ethnic groups are revealed in the composition of the unit. When police organizations are divided by conflict between ethnic groups and this division exists between the top command and detectives, transfers and promotions indicate additional ethnically based power relations.
Detective Work as Casework
Modern detective work, television and movies not withstanding, has been transformed into a bureaucratic function, constrained by procedural constraints, public intolerance of direct efforts to produce confessions, and supervision to reduce corruption, and is less reliant on paid informants, undercover work, and citizen-paid investigations. While the pressures toward intelligence work are extant in the United States, they have been made visible through the creation of the national intelligence model and specialist intelligence units in the United Kingdom. They are primarily, but not exclusively, reactive (to crime brought to their attention) agents of the state, or public servants. Kuykendall (1986, 192) rather unkindly writes that”.. . the role of the police detective [has been] gradually changed to that of a clerk.” This suggests a routinized, impotent, and highly constrained manque.
This view is contested by Ericson (1981/ 1993), who argues that detectives deal with suspects, witnesses, and victims quite differently, depending on the police detective’s definition of the outcomes to be achieved. The game is defined by the officer and played to achieve his or her ends. Further, Ericson sees the detective not as constrained by rules and law but facilitated by them. The officer uses various definitions of the case’s features (who is a victim, who is a suspect) and rules to achieve desired outcomes. These are but two sides of the same process. Detective work is a case-focused enterprise, and preparing cases for court is a demanding aspect of the job.
Officers are assigned cases on a regular basis, either weekly or on a one by one basis as in homicide units. Typically, officers make a first cut. They set aside cases that have little or no chance of being solved: those with no witness, no physical evidence, no suspects or confession, no arrest on the scene. These cases are treated superficially, with only a few calls or interviews. A second set of cases involves those that have some potential to be cleared as a result of further investigation. How these cases are typified varies by the unit (burglary, robbery, homicide, other crimes). For example, in homicide work, a binary division was reported in two departments (Miami and Baltimore) between ”dunkers” or ”smoking gun” cases (immediate arrest or confession) and ”whodunits” (”WDIs”). The time spent on such ”solvable” cases varies but is typically brief. From an instrumental perspective, or the workers’ view of efficiency, screening has three aims: to reduce the workload, to focus effort on those cases most likely to be cleared, and to avoid legal or ”bureaucratic” complications. Concern that these bureaucratic complications may arise leads to failures to complete paperwork or to avoiding it altogether.
The police occupational culture emphasizes the capacity to cope creatively with the unexpected, especially events of social importance but of low statistical probability such as a child kidnapping, a mass murder, or a series of rapes of elderly women. Such matters are central to policing because they are highly visible in the media, raise public anxieties about police effectiveness, and produce enormous goodwill if cleared.
There are therefore exceptions to the screening and focusing activity of detectives. These arise when the case involves a child or an old person, becomes a media case, or involves a politician or notable figure in the city. These are ”high-profile” cases. High-status victims, if they received media attention, are also subject to additional police time and attention. If the victim is a police officer or relative of a police officer, the case will receive special attention, and often special task forces are assigned (Simon 1991; Corsianos 1999). Clearing high-profile cases conveys lasting respect.
Cases do not have equal weight, as the exceptions noted above imply. The time and attention given to a case will depend on the status, gender, and age of the victim.
Detectives, like all officers, are especially sensitive to cases that might reveal any ”dirty laundry”—crimes involving other officers, cover-ups of controversial decisions, or corruption more generally (Corsianos 1999).
Case knowledge is personal, a kind of property not easily shared with others. Knowledge developed and synthesized is not always written and accessible. What might be called collective or institutional memory, facts and associations possessed by individual officer’s that are not written down nor shared, increase iniquitous practices. The occupational culture assumes that information is virtually personal property, and secrecy is highly valued. This is magnified by the absence of articulated databases within departments and (especially in homicide) the absence of easy, known, and trusted modes of data sharing, accessible informant files and records, and access to the case files or databases of other squads, for example, gang, juvenile, drug, or warrant-serving squads.
“Case-focused” means that the efforts of detectives are organized and framed by the named case at hand. For detectives, the “case” is the key concept. It is not just a named manila file folder; it is a concept, itself a social creation, constituted by tradition, by unspoken and tacit knowledge, and by organizational processes. The definition of a case is very subtle. This is certainly true of proactive investigations, such as watching and tracking members of a drug-dealing network in which any transaction, individual, or group of two or more persons could be the target and any number of tactics could be used, such as informants, a buy bust, or tracking back to the wholesaler. In proactive cases, the flexibility of the concept of a case is clear, and the deciding done by agents shapes who will be the target, how the case will be worked, the tactics employed, and what the hoped-for results will be.
In reactive investigations, on the other hand, such as a stranger-stranger rape, it is rare for officers to see the incident reported as being connected to outstanding domestic violence cases, other rapes unless they are dramatic and occur in a short time span, and drug cases. The aim is to narrow the quest for a clearance and close the case, not widen or deepen it. The case is the center; connections to other cases (unless after the fact to clear cases “taken into consideration”), multiple victims of the villain, or direct links between the case of someone arrested and another case are of secondary concern.
The day-to-day work of a detective illustrates some combination of a walk in bureaucratic doldrums and occasioned, situational rationality. This type of rationality is case based, craftlike, and often stylistic and is sensitive to the changing horizon of possibilities that a case represents. The detective’s “case” is defined by the layered meanings it denotes and connotes in the subjective and objective forces in the surround (the social structure of the city) and the field (the occupational values, routines, and tacit knowledge).
By “working a case well,” detectives mean the flair, the aesthetics one brings to the work. It is assumed that things will go wrong: Witnesses disappear or recant testimony, evidence will be overlooked or contaminated, interrogations will go badly, and errors in procedure will arise (see Simon 1991,195-220). While some officers do not work much or are incompetent (and known to be incompetent), most officers use their past experience, tacit or intuitive knowledge, and understanding of typical areas and practices to construct what might be done and why. Officers develop their cases privately and restrict access to their cases, thus reducing the capacity of crime analysts or other officers to infer patterns of cooffending or to identify multiple victims of the same murderer or links between crimes. While they may try to clear a series of cases with similar features by eliciting a confession or agreement to cooperate, thus clearing several, they are working from a perpetrator to cases, not by examining diverse cases that may link a set of co-offenders or, least likely, working from ”raw intelligence” to discover a yet unknown suspect or set of suspects. The individual detective is seen as the defining “expert” in a case unless it is reassigned. “Working” a homicide case begins with a crime and usually a body. It seems to involve a combination of substantive and concrete local knowledge—of offenders, settings, and types of offenses—associational thinking, responding to intuitive hunches, and following leads. It would be difficult to devise an expert system version of such detecting.
Performance or success is indicated traditionally by unit clearance rates, arrests, and seizures in drugs units. Court convictions are of little interest unless the case is an important one politically in the city. Clearance is an organizational term not to be confused with solved (in the conventional sense of arresting a perpetrator), closed (which means investigative efforts were abandoned), or closely investigated to the point of exhausting the clues. A case may be cleared in a variety of ways. These include clearance by issuing a warrant, either by name or a John Doe warrant, cases being transferred to another jurisdiction or force (for example, the FBI or tribal or state police), and those cleared by exception (two men shoot each other, a murder-suicide combination). There are local variations about what is an excepted clearance. In short, the term is context dependent. Homicide is considered the most consistently measured and investigated crime and of greatest public concern. However, criteria for clearing a homicide are neither universal nor universally applied. While the Bureau of Justice Statistics compiles the Uniform Crime Reports and defines and sets standards for homicides and clearances, practices in individual departments vary, as do the warranted processes of producing an organizationally acceptable clearance.
Officers and squads keep records of clearances, and sergeants and lieutenants seek to increase the clearance rate or the percentage of homicides cleared. The personnel, size of the unit, number of homicides, and percentage ”cleared” (an organizational label) vary in urban departments. Most reported crimes, unlike homicide, are processed quickly and given little attention. The clearance rate for homicide varies across the country; estimates are from 60+% to more than 90%. The homicide clearance rate itself appears to have low association with reported crime rates in general (JCRS research). It is a powerful reflexive indicator used generally to assess the performance of the unit, even while it is routinely manipulated, and is insensitive to the quality of the investigation and court results (Martinez 1996). While there are pressures to ”produce” and a focus on clearances (Waegel 1982; Simon 1991, 197 ff.), clearances result for the most part from the structural, political, economic, social, and psychological forces that shape the event more than from how the detective works the case as paperwork that has to be cleared. Research (Greenwood, Petersilia, and Chaikin 1977) suggests that a few key elements—physical evidence, witnesses present, or a confession—are of critical importance in determining the probability of a clearance. These are rarely under the officer’s control. In many respects, social scientists have been taken in by the oral culture of detectives that emphasizes this pressure.
Clearances, although a standard measure of police detective work, like arrests, are not always sought. It depends. Closing a case, clearing it from organizational records, is but one of several functions of a homicide investigation. While conventional wisdom would elevate the instrumental aim, a closure, there are expressive or socioemotional aspects of the investigation, such as the quality of the police work involved or the wish to hold a case to obtain witness cooperation or confession or to protect the families of the witnesses or victims. Even in a matter as serious as murder, charges are laid to discipline people, to force them to confess to acknowledge complicity in other crimes or to a lesser charge. Thus, the present topic is merely background to other moral and political issues (Corsianos 1999, 98) and a focus for a repertoire of tactics. While police detectives deal with many crimes, these crimes are clustered in areas of large cities where witnesses are reticent and revenge and retaliation operate, areas that are crime dependent insofar as types of crimes (burglaries and drug use) and criminals are linked. Because detectives see themselves as catching criminals and putting them in jail, the failure to clear crimes causes morale variations and cynicism among detectives.
Detective work remains a complex sub-specialty within policing, and the culture reflects some of its self-created nuances and tactics. It stands midway between the citizen and the organization, a kind of buffer that expands and contracts its tactical reservoir as need be.
