Why the Inspector Lestrade exists - and why Lestrades are more common than people realize
You would think that if the Amateur Sleuth or the Private Detective is able to solve cases with their intelligence, wouldn’t professional detectives in police forces be equally capable, if not more so? Why is your average homicide dick so obtuse and dense? Let’s examine the process by which policemen and police detectives are made.
The Profession of Policing
Despite crime solving being presented in the media as a glamorous, stimulating adventure requiring smarts and strength to accomplish, policing as a whole is seen as a blue collar profession. And it carries with it the many negative connotations of blue collar work. In fact, the Police Academies which train civilians to become policemen, are much like Trade Schools where other blue collar types go to receive vocational training. Like any Trade School, a Police Academy requires that applicants only have high school diplomas or equivalent. Although people with college degrees can and do join police forces and go through the academy, they are often the exception rather than the rule. So, if someone had the kind of problem solving skills that would make them more proficient at solving complicated criminal plots, they would certainly take them to more prestigious and/or well paying fields instead of mere policing. So, the typical police force is already suffering from a case of Brain Drain.
Investigation Training
At a police academy, cadets are taught everything one needs to know, to do the job of a police officer. They are trained in police procedures, tactical driving, firearms, hand to hand combatives, basic understanding of the laws they will be enforcing, various ways to communicate with people, and even … the conducting of investigations.
Training in investigations involve the following facets
Observation: How to look out for suspicious activity. How to notice things that may be out of place. How to spot fine details that may be relevant to solving a crime.
Spatial Reasoning: How did object A end up in its current position and state, from where it was assumed to initially be. For example, was a vase knocked over during a scuffle, or was it carefully placed there for some other reason?
Temporal Reasoning: Did individual B perform Action C during Time Period D? For example, if B provided an alibi that he was performing Action E during Time Period D, did he reasonably have enough time to perform both actions C and E?
Interviewing: How to talk to bystanders and witnesses and gather relevant information from them? How to follow up on omitted details? How to clarify ambiguous statements?
Interrogation: How to question a subject of investigation or a suspect of a crime. What are the tools and techniques to be used to get a usually adversarial subject, spill the beans? How to spot threads, inconsistencies, contradictions and so on.
It is with these skills that a patrolman investigates a domestic disturbance or car accident. And it is also with these skills, that a homicide investigator attempts to solve a murder. Notice that all of the above are face value skills that the typical Lestrade already has.
Making “Detective”
So, if policemen enter the profession equipped only with the investigative techniques taught to them at the academy, how do those who want to become crime solvers instead of beat pounders, get that job? Common sense states that they should be sent to a “detective school” where their investigation techniques are further improved, right? Actually, no such schools exist because the techniques used in advanced crime solving involve very highly specialized esoteric knowledge that is often very situational. So, it is more economical and practical for a detective to be able to utilize these experts on an as needed basis rather than training them for maybe a decade and a half to turn them into some all knowing Renaissance Man.
Typically, a detective started out as a uniformed cop, assisting other detectives in investigations. They would often do the necessary grunt work of searching areas for items relevant to the crime, cataloguing items found at the crime scene, canvassing the area, interviewing witnesses and other bystanders, taking statements, and eventually assisting in arrests and interrogations. As they assist in more cases, they hone the skills they learned at the academy. Eventually, when they display some threshold of proficiency i.e. tending to notice more important details, asking bystanders more relevant questions, or even racking up a higher than average number of arrests, the detectives notice. And eventually recommend these capable eager beavers for promotion to a detective rank aka the “gold shield”.
From there on, rookie detectives will be partnered up with veterans to further learn the eccentricities of the job and hone their skills further. And by the time they’ve become experienced veterans, they’ll be more capable of spotting threads and knowing what to look for, because they’ve Seen It All.
But even veteran detectives know that many times, certain specialized knowledge is required to solve crimes. Fortunately, the department gives them access to a pool of experts whose brains they can pick.
The Domain Experts
Police generally rely on the following three types of experts.
Forensics Technicians: Forensics technicians are people who process crime scenes, collect all sorts of evidence including fingerprints, hair and DNA samples, chemical and/or biological matter present at the crime scene, weapons etc. They then analyze the evidence in laboratories and attempt to match it to suspects. Since forensics is a complicated, exacting science, your average beat cop or gold shield cannot be trained in these techniques. In the labs, technicians compare evidence and samples collected at the crime scene to samples provided by a suspect. Matching the two, will never yield an exact comparison, so expertise formed by experience comes into play. An experienced analyst who has for example compared thousands of fingerprints will be able to judge just how good enough a match needs to be, to make a credible case. Unlike what shows like CSI and Bones depict, forensics technicians don’t solve entire cases themselves. This is because forensic evidence alone is often insufficient to actually convict anyone.
Medical Examiners: Medical examiners aka coroners are board certified doctors who’s specialty is the performance of autopsies on corpses. They cut open corpses in surgical clean rooms and attempt to determine both the cause of death and to estimate what the victim may have been doing prior to their death. In fact, if you go by shows such as Bones medical examiners could very well be the geniuses capable of solving murders entirely on their own. That is because medical science is based entirely on observing small details about appearance, behavior etc and diagnosing problems. In fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on a physician he once knew.
But, for the same reason that Forensic techs alone are incapable of actually solving crimes, medical examiners are also inadequately trained to solve crimes. Although medical examiners make compelling witnesses in trials, their scope is still limited to what happened to the corpse. For example, a medical examiner can determine cause of death to be a gunshot to the head by a fifty caliber bullet, but there is no way they can determine which exact gun fired the bullet, and they certainly cannot determine who handled that gun at the exact time of death. It is why, medical examiners’ findings are just one piece of a larger pool of evidence presented at a trial.
Technical Assistance: In the modern day, technology is both a boon and hindrance to crime solving. The hindrance is that detailed records, recordings or other evidence of criminal activity tends to be locked away in cellphones, smart devices, cloud servers etc; all of them protected by encryption. The boon however, is that there is a lot of information about individuals floating around in the Internet. Not to mention both surveillance and sousveillance (public spying on officials or on each other) footage. All of this, now requires police departments to hire specially trained technicians capable of extracting relevant information from electronic devices, computers, servers etc. And add this to the pile of information that a detective already has.
Building Prosecutable Cases
So, what if a police detective or his/her ally was capable of making the kinds of non-linear leaps of logic that allowed him or her to find perpetrators faster than those who just followed procedure and waited for the experts? They would run into problems when those perpetrators were brought to trial.
When a prosecutor brings the case the detective built to a jury, he will now have to explain all the leaps of logic and intuitive gut feelings of the detective to the jurors. While a defense attorney is also trying to convince those jurors that the detective made a mistake and their client is innocent. If the prosecutor tries to place some genius on the stand and he testifies that after noticing facts A, B and C, he extrapolated and deduced Fact M, which obviously proves the defendant guilty, a defense attorney can argue that in his leap of logic from C directly to M, he overlooked facts H and I which can exculpate his client. Or he overlooked Fact J which directly contradicts Fact M.
This is why prosecutors prefer someone who diligently followed the process, carefully obtained all facts A to M and can therefore get on the stand and claim that even though Facts H and I exculpate the suspect, and Fact J renders Fact M moot, Facts A through G along with Facts K and L make a very strong case for the defendant’s guilt. And only a team of the experts mentioned above, can obtain all facts A to M that build the case.
Which is why most police departments would rather have the Lestrade who delegates tasks and defers to experts, rather than the Holmes who can reach conclusions that can sometimes be spectacularly wrong.
