Jargon buster - The meaning of detection

Armchair detectives don't do paperwork

The Guardian reported last weekend that: “Labour said a shortage of trained detectives, with almost 7,000 vacancies across the UK, could be tackled if more forces directly recruited people with relevant skills, such as those working in business fraud, child protection or some areas of technology.”

As a former Fraud Squad Detective Superintendent, with first-hand experience of recruiting specialists into the police, I was interested in the idea of recruiting ‘those working in business fraud’. Firstly though, I welcome whole-heartedly the fact that criminal justice is one of the five priorities for Labour.

I was also struck by the magnitude of the problem, 7,000 trained detectives is an absolutely enormous number, far more than the entire investigator strength of either the National Crime Squad or the Metropolitan and City of London Police combined. The scale of the crisis in criminal justice is almost enough to drag me out of retirement.

My view is that, in the long-term, the idea has merit, but in the short-term it would be very expensive, and, far from solving the immediate crisis it would actually make it worse. It appears that Labour may have gleaned the policy idea from a report by the Police Foundation specifically these two Recommendations:

“23. All forces should introduce direct entry detective programmes.”

“26. The College of Policing should strengthen career pathways for allied policing professions in areas such as data analysis/science, digital forensics and financial investigation.”

A detailed critique of this report and the composition of its contributors, by Jonathan Sutherland, I found interesting.

I recruited the first direct entry financial investigators and the first ‘specialist’ Special Constables (accountants) into the Metropolitan Police Service. I applaud the idea of recruiting ‘business fraud’ experts, but I don’t think this will solve or even address the current problem caused by the detective vacancies.

The vacancies create a perceived detection gap. A member of the public might reasonably think that a person skilled in understanding business fraud might understand business fraud crimes better than a generalist detective and thereby fill that detection gap. This fundamentally misunderstands what detectives do in 95% of their detecting time. Being a ‘trained detective’, the term used by the Labour Party, is almost exclusively the skill and experience to gather admissible evidence that complies with disclosure, court presentation and investigation rules. The time spent detecting, in the sense of working out whodunit, is a very small part of the role and, in any case is mostly done by financial intelligence staff, analysts and researchers a few of whom may be detectives.  

If we were to proceed with recruiting ‘business fraud’ experts we would essentially be recruiting people who are unskilled for the task in hand. They would need to be trained and then mentored in the workplace by experienced detectives. They would also require extra management support and immediate day to day supervision from senior detectives. In short, they would impose a direct and significant workload onto already overstretched departments, for a significant period of time to be measured in years not months (in my experience). There is also a significant recruitment risk, where the police already have a major retention problem. They may not like the police environment, the public and courtroom scrutiny of their work or the prejudice that they may experience in their personal lives.

I am in favour of a diversity of skills and experience in police detectives, and the ability to move between agencies and between the public and private sector. But it is not a quick fix, it is not cheap and, in the face of the crisis that has engulfed UK criminal justice, this policy idea needs a lot more input from personnel with the relevant skills, to use Labour’s own terminology.

On a lighter note, I thought I would just explore where the misunderstanding of the detective’s role might come from. Detectives, the world over, are admired and envied by the general public for their ability to work out ‘whodunit’? This puzzle-solving element is enjoyed by millions of people in the UK who solve countless crimes in books, TV series and films, hopefully just before the fictional detective explains whodunit. Everyone wants to be a detective, including the Labour Party policy lead, Jess Philips. And why not? It is one of many interesting jobs in the police and in the public service, more generally.

In the vast majority of real-life casework, the suspect(s) are immediately apparent and, in fact, 95%* of detective time is spent working on the evidence that proves which suspect did what to a standard that complies precisely with the relevant requirements of the CPIA, PACE, POCA, various CJA their respective CoP and many, many more procedural, statutory or presentational rules. Believe me, working out whodunit is the easy bit.

No, I’m not going to tell you what all those acronyms stand for. Why not become a UK detective and find out? You too can be poorly paid, overworked and disrespected for being a consummate professional in the UK public service.

*95% is my estimate, as an experienced manager of many hundreds of detectives over many years, if a reader can point me to empirical research I would be grateful.