Predictors of Successful Investigations Research Paper

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The continuing tension in our society between community and individual interests has shaped police investigation styles since the 1840s. In the context of this tension, the relative ineffectiveness of the current traditional, reactive, and case-oriented investigation style is examined in terms of four predictors that affect whether or not the investigation of a crime may be successful. Recent developments in community policing and terrorism matters indicate how to increase investigative successes, but they can also alter the balance between community and individual interests in ways that may not have yet been fully resolved.

Introduction

When a crime is committed in the United States, what is the likelihood that it will be investigated successfully? Apparently, based on the available information, it does not appear to be very likely indeed. In this research paper, four major predictors of police criminal investigation successes are examined in separate sections. They are as follows:

Does the crime become known to the police?
Does the crime survive the case screening process of the police?
What factors affect the police investigation?
What is a successful investigation?

For each predictor, the paper describes significant influences on investigative outcomes and identifies some of the major issues involved. It concludes with a look at what the future may hold for police investigations.

Does The Crime Become Known To The Police?

In the United States, one of the more common ways to categorize various types of crimes is as follows (Cole and Smith 2008):

Visible crimes – including murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson and lesser disorders such as vagrancy, shoplifting, vandalism, and violations of local ordinances and codes
Victimless crimes – crimes such as drug offenses, prostitution, and gambling that involve illegal exchanges of goods or services
Organized crimes – crimes committed by social frameworks organized to commit crimes
Occupational crimes – crimes committed within a legal business or profession
Political crimes – crimes such as terrorism, treason, sedition, and espionage

It is only in the Visible Crime Category that we have national crime statistics programs that annually document the number of crimes committed in the United States, and there are two such programs. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is one program and is discussed below. The Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is the other and is addressed in the next section.

The NCVS is a national survey effort in which about 60,000 people aged 12 and over are interviewed twice during a year’s period to learn about crime and victims of crime. It generates estimates of victimization rates for the violent crimes of rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault and the property crimes of burglary, motor vehicle theft, and household theft. It is sponsored by the United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) (BJS 2010b).

One might think that when a crime is committed, it is only natural to report it to the police. However, upon examination, it becomes obvious that this is not the case. In fact, it seems there are often more reasons for not reporting crimes than for reporting them. The NCVS is the only major national program that gives a clear indicator from the victim’s perspective as to whether or not crimes are reported to police, and it shows that fewer than half of the visible crimes that it tracks are actually reported. When the self-identified victims of those crimes were asked why they did not report to the police crimes that were committed against them, their reasons included the crime being a personal or private matter, the severity of the offense, fear of reprisal, and to protect the offender (Hart and Rennison 2003).

For the remaining four major crime categories (victimless, organized, occupational, and political), it is much more difficult to determine the number of crimes committed, as there are no national crime statistics programs that document them, and there are reasons for this. With regard to victimless crimes, for example, many of the people involved are willing participants (e.g., drug dealers and users) who are typically strongly motivated to not report their crimes to the police or anyone else for fear of incriminating themselves. Often, in organized crimes involving gangs, (city gangs, the Mafia, etc.), even when there are clear victims, such as in extortion cases, the victims may not report crimes because of the very real threats of reprisal made by the gangs. Occupational crimes committed in corporations (cybercrime, industrial espionage, internal fraud, tax evasion, etc.) may not be reported for fear of damaging corporate reputations and the potential harm that such exposure to the public could have on their business and financial status. Political crimes involving terrorists and spies (treason, espionage, etc.) are often not reported openly to the public for security reasons and also for many of the same reasons that crimes in the other categories may not be reported, including guilty involvement, fear of reprisal, and national reputations (Cole and Smith 2008).

Issues

It is clear that most crimes committed in the United States never become known to the police and are never subjected to police investigations. Therefore, one of the primary predictors of the successful investigation of a crime is that it first becomes known to the police.

It seems that the decision of individuals to report crime is often based on whether or not they adjudge it to be in their best self-interest to do so. If they, as victims or community members, are motivated to seek justice, or to maintain or regain freedom from crime, they will likely report crime to the police to achieve those ends. However, if they view reporting crime as a threat to their personal interests or status, then they will likely not seek recourse or justice through the criminal justice system (May et al. 2008).

This theme of how community vs. individual interests influences the reporting of crime information to the police is mirrored in how information is processed through the criminal justice system. Two models have been used to describe the process – crime control and due process. While both models emphasize personal freedom, crime control applies an assembly line approach to repress crime by subjecting criminal matters to a routine, informal administrative and discretionary process in order to maximize disposition. This includes filtering out cases that do not contain sufficient information to act upon. This model essentially represents the community interest in maintaining freedom by dealing with as many crime problems as possible in a practical and efficient way. Due process, on the other hand, emphasizes individual interests and liberty. It advocates an obstacle course approach that relies on legal and procedural restraints to test the reliability of evidence regarding criminal matters in a formalized adversarial process. Its aim is to protect the innocent from undue persecution, even at the expense of allowing the guilty to not be held to account (Cole and Smith 2008). As will be seen in the following sections, the American criminal justice system appears to operate generally along the lines of the crime control model, but with increasingly more due process constraints built into it as an accused person is processed through it.

Does The Crime Survive The Case Screening Process Of The Police?

If most crimes are not reported to the police, then how effectively do the police deal with the ones that are in fact reported to them? In addressing this question, the UCR, mentioned previously, provides some answers. It should be noted here that the terms “agency” and “agencies” are used in this research paper to refer to governmental law enforcement organizations in the United States in general, and the term “police” includes state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies.

The UCR is a compilation of data reported by more than 18,000 police agencies regarding the types and numbers of crimes reported to them. Police document in the UCR 28 categories of crimes reported to them. However, they report the crimes that they subsequently resolve, or clear, for only eight categories. A “cleared” crime, or “clearance,” generally means that an offender has been arrested, charged with the commission of an offense, and turned over to the courts for prosecution. The eight crimes for which police report clearance rates are the violent crimes of murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault and the property crimes of burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson. These eight crimes are known as the UCR Index crimes, and they overlap to some extent with the six crimes tracked by the NCVS. However, whereas the NCVS counts crimes that victims say were committed against them, the UCR reflects only the crimes that police say are reported to them, and the UCR Index crimes reflect the numbers of those reported crimes that the police say they cleared. The UCR is published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (FBI 2010).

The UCR data help to understand the police case screening process. When a crime is reported to the police, a police patrol officer usually responds to the complainant or crime scene and conducts a preliminary investigation. The term “patrol officer” is used generically here and includes law enforcement officers (police officers, sheriff deputies, state troopers, etc.) whose primary duties are related to patrol. Based on the preliminary investigation, the reported crime is documented in the agency UCR crime report.

If the crime is a non-Index crime, its further disposition is not documented in the UCR. If the crime is an Index crime and the patrol officer’s preliminary investigation clears it, then it is counted in the UCR as a cleared crime. If sufficient information is not developed during the preliminary investigation to clear a crime, it will usually be referred to investigators to determine whether a follow-up investigation is warranted. Detectives in about 60 % of agencies use written criteria called case solvability factors as guides to determine this. (The terms “investigator” and “detective” are used interchangeably.) If the case is “screened” out (not further pursued) or if it is pursued in a follow-up investigation but not resolved, the likelihood of it ever being solved is minimal. If the case is pursued and subsequently cleared, it is documented as such in the UCR. According to the UCR, the police investigation and case screening process result in clearing only about 20 % of all the reported Index crimes (BJS 1988; Eck 1983; Greenwood et al. 1977; Maguire and Pastore 2001).

The seminal study on the police criminal investigation process, called the Rand Report, was conducted during the 1970s (Greenwood et al. 1977). Although it surveyed only about 300 large municipal and sheriff agencies, it found that investigators comprised an average of 17 % of an agency’s sworn officers and that they generally investigated only the more serious crimes. It also found that the primary investigative task of investigators was talking to people and that they actually spent less than one-third of their time investigating unsolved cases. They spent the remainder of their time on non-case (45 %) and post-arrest activities (26 %).

During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of other research studies were conducted in an effort to improve agency investigative performance. The following points represent the general consensus regarding what they found:

The public is by far the largest source of crime information for the police.
The police detect by themselves only about 5 % of the Index crimes they deal with.
The patrol officer plays a critical role in the investigation process, in that the preliminary investigation either clears the case or determines whether the crime will be screened out or further investigated.
More than 80 % of the cases cleared by the police are the result of the identification of perpetrators when a crime is initially reported, on-scene arrests made by patrol officers, other patrol officer investigative activity, or information provided spontaneously by the public.
Detectives play a critical role in conducting follow-up investigations and post-arrest activities, and many of their duties require highly specialized skills.
The amount of information available to police about reported crimes is mainly a function of the type of crime and the circumstances in which they occur.
For most reported crimes (i.e., burglaries, larcenies), the amount of information that can be provided by the public to responding patrol officers is very low, and therefore, the capacity of the police to solve crime based on the reported circumstances is generally quite limited.
Physical evidence is collected in less than 10 % of police investigations, and much of the collected evidence is never submitted for analysis. Thus, in the great majority of cases, physical evidence plays a relatively minor role.
A number of investigative reforms to improve agency clearance rates were tested in field studies since the 1970s, but they showed at best only a marginal effect, as investigators had only a relatively minor impact on agency arrest and clearance rates.
Case resolution rates are much more heavily influenced by cooperation between citizens and the police and patrol officer activities.

The research essentially agreed on the relative ineffectiveness of what has become known as the traditional, reactive, and case-oriented style of police investigation (respond to reports of crime, conduct preliminary investigation, screen out cases with insufficient information, conduct follow-up investigation as appropriate, and either clear or cease further investigation – hereinafter referred to as the “traditional” investigation style) (Eck 1983; Greenwood et al. 1977; Horvath and Meesig 1996; Skogan and Antunes 1979).

Over the past four decades, the average UCR Index crime rates have fluctuated only about 2 % (from lows of just under 4,000 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in the 1970s to highs of over 5,900 per 100,000 in the 1990s) and, in recent years, have hovered below the 1970s crime rates. Additionally, average clearance rates have consistently ranged about 2.6 % around a 20 % average, despite changes in the nature of crime, the police, and our society (FBI 2010; Maguire and Pastore 2001). This suggests that successful (defined here as cleared) investigations may be influenced at least as much by the traditional investigation style itself as other factors. This lends support to the Rand Report and other research that the amount of information available regarding reported crimes is normally very low and that the constrained traditional investigation style produces consistent case outcomes over time.

Issues

If the first major predictor of a successful investigation is a crime becoming known to the police, then clearly the second major predictor is for the crime to survive the police case screening process. Together they exclude from consideration by the rest of the criminal justice system (prosecution, courts, corrections) the great bulk of the visible crimes committed in our society. This is in addition to the unknown amounts of victimless, organizational, occupational, and political crimes that are eliminated because they are never reported to, investigated, or cleared by the police.

The police case screening process illustrates to some degree how the community and crime control interests vs. the individual due process interests are applied in the criminal justice system, and how they influence investigative outcomes. Cases and offenders are subjected to a winnowing screening process that supports community interests in repressing crime by routinely producing cleared cases that will best support a prosecution. While these cleared cases may be considered successful investigations, the system at the same time protects individuals by screening out most of the cases due to the lack of sufficient evidence. While these might in turn be considered unsuccessful investigations, they do provide for an orderly way to safeguard individual rights. To better understand how this has impacted the police, it is worth taking a brief look at how and why the police investigation process has evolved in the United States.

What Factors Affect The Police Investigation?

In the early nineteenth century, the powerful forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution brought with them burgeoning problems of social disorder in the dynamic and expanding cities of the United States. Based on the general model of local government police organizations that were formed in England to deal with similar problems in the 1830 s, new public city police forces began to appear in American cities in the 1840s. The focus of detectives in these agencies was essentially offender-oriented, in that their job was mainly to associate with the criminal underworld, either covertly or openly, in order to obtain information about criminal activities.

Described as Secretive Rogues, they often worked proactively with minimal central control or supervision. Corruption, abuse of authority, privacy issues, and political influence were common problems in police agencies, including among the Secretive Rogue detectives. This has been described as the “Political Era” of policing (Kuykendall 1986; Langworthy and Travis 1999).

In the early twentieth century, the increasing public outcry against widespread government corruption and abuse eventually brought about broad societal change, including the reorganization and centralization of the police. The resulting new “Reform Era” of policing “professionalized” the police by reducing political influence, corruption, and abuse and by increasing police accountability (Trojanowicz and Carter 1988).

Detectives also experienced changes regarding how they performed their duties during this era. Initially, the Secretive Rogue proactive offender-oriented style was restructured into an Inquisitor style of reactive case-oriented investigations. Detective autonomy and access to the underworld was constrained by closer supervisory controls and, rather than working to detect crime, they were assigned to investigate criminal cases that had already been committed and reported to the police. In order to compensate for the loss of their own direct contacts with criminals in the underworld, detectives often resorted to the inquisitorial tactics of coercion to develop clandestine informers to collect information for them, and they focused on strong interrogation methods utilizing physical brutality and psychological pressure to elicit confessions from identified suspects (Kuykendall 1986).

By the 1940s, however, the Inquisitor investigator style began to evolve into an administration-oriented Bureaucrat who practiced an even more confined style of investigation. The increasing police controls over investigators and the burgeoning caseloads forced agencies to emphasize stronger and more organized case management in order to permit prosecutors and courts to deal with cases more efficiently. The goal of investigators changed from solving crime by any means to a more bureaucratic, legally guided, and orderly management of information designed primarily to process and dispose of cases, whether they were solved or not (Kuykendall 1986).

In the 1960s, again amid widespread civil unrest and rising crime rates in urban areas, the police once again became the target of strong public disapproval. The police were often viewed as both hostile and repressive, and the professional policing style came under heavy criticism for having isolated the police from the social environment in which they operated. In response to this, the federal government funded a series of research programs to better understand and deal with this issue. This marked the first time that any significant empirical research (including the Rand Report and other studies reviewed above) was conducted in this area (Kuykendall 1986; President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1968; Langworthy and Travis 1999).

The “Era of Community Policing” essentially evolved out of much of the research regarding the police/public relationship in the 1970s and 1980s. Community policing has been described as a fundamental shift away from traditional policing and toward a broader, more comprehensive philosophy of crime prevention. It is arguably the dominant model of policing in the United States today, in that at least two-thirds of all local agencies practice some form of community policing. In general terms, it promotes the “Broken Windows” approach by using patrol officers as Community Policing Officers to build close working relationships with the community and to use problem-solving methodologies with community partners to prevent crime. However, the effect of community policing on the traditional investigation style of the Bureaucrat investigator was not clear (BJS 2010a; Trojanowicz and Carter 1988; Wilson and Kelling 1982).

In 2001, the first-ever nationally representative survey of police agencies regarding the police criminal investigation process was conducted to update and expand the Rand Report (Horvath et al. 2001). A total of 3,123 agencies of all sizes were surveyed, and 1,746 (56 %) responded. The respondents employed more than half of the full-time sworn officers (over 350,000) in the country, about 16 % (50,000) of which were investigators. Overall, the survey findings revealed that the police investigation process seemed to have been relatively uninfluenced by changes in policing over the prior 30 years. Although there were some promising developments, the traditional Bureaucrat style of investigations remained predominant. Beyond unique case-specific problems, the overwhelming majority (90 %) of agencies did not identify any legal issues as important problems affecting investigations. This included the use of operational techniques such as searches, informants, undercover activities, sting operations, surveillance, covert listening devices, interviews and interrogations, coercion, and arrests. Further, they did not identify any significant problems regarding their relationships with prosecutors. They reported that the top three factors that would improve their investigation clearance rates were more personnel, technology, and training. They indicated no significant plans to change the investigation process in the future, and they did not project any clear vision of how their role in community policing related to their investigative function.

In 2004, an analysis of the data in the 2001 survey was conducted to determine specifically whether community policing had affected police practices in investigating and solving crime (Meesig 2004). The study found that general community policing practices in agencies have a significant positive effect on murder and robbery, and provided clear support for the effective integration of community policing and investigations to improve police clearance rates. However, as in the 2001 survey, no significant evidence was found of any substantive internal agency management efforts among most agencies to do so.

In addition to community policing, a more recent factor has affected the police investigations process – terrorism. After the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and the attack on the Pentagon in the Washington, D.C. area, by terrorists on September 11, 2001, this has become a national priority. While the act of a terrorist incident itself is designed to take place in a public venue, the planning and preparation for such an attack often occurs in the homes and neighborhoods of our communities. And while federal and military agencies (more than 65 agencies, 85,000 sworn officers) may have primary jurisdiction over many such attacks, it is the people who live in our communities who stand to bear the brunt of most of the attacks, and it is the much larger force of municipal and sheriff agencies (more than 15,000 agencies and 600,000 sworn officers) that are already situated in the communities that have the greatest access to potentially terrorist-related information over the longest periods of time (Meesig et al. 2002). Also, as the primary goal of terrorism investigations is to prevent the terrorist act from occurring, they frequently require intrusive offender-oriented investigative tactics and extensive information collection and collaboration between federal and local agencies (Horvath et al. 2001; Meesig 2004).

To facilitate the investigation of terrorism, various laws have expanded the legal and organizational authorities of agencies to collect and use information to prevent terrorism (Bulzomi 2003). Additionally, federal and local investigators have out of necessity resorted to many of the methods employed in the past by the Secretive Rogue and Inquisitor detectives (covert/undercover activities, the use of clandestine sources, etc.) to neutralize terrorist plots before they can be carried out. This has apparently been done to good effect to date, as at least 40 significant terrorist plots against the United States have reportedly been thwarted since 2001 (Carafano and Zuckerman 2011).

Issues

As can be seen from a historical perspective, a third predictor of successful investigations is an investigation style that is acceptable to both community and individual interests. The various aspects, or factors, of investigation styles that have created controversy in the past have included the corruption, abuse, privacy issues, and political influence that were prevalent in the Secretive Rogue style and the coercion and brutality factors in the Inquisitor style. It appears that by minimizing these factors, in conjunction with implementing less aggressive case-oriented and screening factors, the current traditional Bureaucratic style has become more accepted by community and individual interests.

While community policing and terrorism investigations have demonstrated positive results and support community crime control interests in preventing and repressing crime, they employ more intrusive and offender-oriented methods than the traditional investigation style, and they clearly raise issues regarding the protection of individual rights and due process. One need only recall the NCVS survey findings regarding victims’ stated reasons for not reporting crimes (privacy matters, severity of offense, fear of reprisal, offender relationships, etc.) to wonder how long the public will continue to tolerate these offender-oriented investigations in the future, even though they are legally sanctioned.

What Is A Successful Investigation?

How one describes a successful investigation can depend on one’s view. In this section, several different perspectives of success are examined.

An unfounded crime is essentially a report to the police that a crime occurred, but subsequent investigation determines that the crime actually did not occur. The investigation is successful in that it resolved the false crime report. However, it is generally not counted as a success because it is not counted in the UCR (FBI 2010).

Whereas the term unfounded focuses on the status of a crime, the term cleared focuses more broadly on the status of a person. As previously mentioned, a reported crime is documented as cleared in the UCR if at least one person has been arrested, charged with the crime, and turned over to the court for prosecution (FBI 2010). Cleared crimes are commonly considered to be successful investigations, but there are some definitional issues:

The UCR only counts the number of crimes that are cleared, not the number of persons arrested.
In some cases, an offender may have been identified and located and sufficient evidence gathered to support an arrest, but circumstances beyond an agency’s control precluded the agency from making the actual arrest (offender’s death, extradition issues, etc). In such cases, the crime is considered cleared by exception in UCR reporting, even though no one has been arrested or prosecuted.
In matters involving a juvenile offender, a case may be considered cleared if the juvenile is cited to appear before juvenile authorities, even though no arrest was made.

So using the UCR definition of a cleared crime as a criterion of a successful investigation, one or more persons may be arrested or not arrested (exceptional and juvenile clearance) and then turned over or not turned over (again exceptional and juvenile clearance) to the courts. That statement may seem a bit confusing, but it illustrates the nuances involved in using clearance rates to identify successful investigations.

Aside from the definitional issues regarding unfounded crimes and clearance rates, there are a number of other issues, three of which are mentioned here:

Some agencies do not report crimes to the UCR, and others may either accidentally or knowingly report erroneous data (BJS 1999).
Sometimes key information regarding an offender’s identification or arrest warrants is not entered in a timely and reasonable manner into state-wide and national databases that make such information available to law enforcement agencies throughout the country (BJS 1999).
Technical advances, such as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis, which become available after a case is closed without being cleared, may help to identify suspects from evidence previously collected. They may also help to clear people convicted of crimes they did not commit and to identify the actual offenders (Cromett and Thurston-Myster 2005; DNA Institute 2010; Moses et al. 2010). These reporting and technology-related issues are often beyond the purview of individual investigators to directly influence, but they can affect whether or not an investigation is considered successfully cleared because they may provide key pieces of information impacting on investigation outcomes.

It can be argued that an investigation should not be considered successful unless it leads to the prosecution of an offender. However, determinations to prosecute can also depend upon circumstances beyond police control. In about one-third of the cleared police investigations, the offenders are juveniles and are referred to juvenile authorities and often not prosecuted. In the remaining two-thirds of cleared cases, the adult offenders are referred to a prosecutor, but only about 55 % of them are actually accepted for prosecution. The remaining 45 % are not prosecuted for a variety of reasons. For example, the police tend to use what has been described as a “probable cause” standard to refer cases for prosecution. In essence, once they make the determination that there is probable cause (e.g., sufficient information has been developed) to indicate that a specific person is likely to be guilty of a crime, they make the referral. However, a prosecutor is required to prove the guilt of a person “beyond a reasonable doubt” in court and may decide that insufficient evidence existed to meet that higher standard. This is reported to be the situation for about 50 % of referred-but-not-prosecuted cases. Other reasons for non-prosecution may include witness issues (about 20 % of cases) or other factors (BJS 1988; Cole and Smith 2008; Forst 1995).

It can also be argued that the clearance and prosecution of a case are still insufficient to be considered a successful investigation. Rather, success should depend on whether or not an offender is actually convicted of a crime. The majority of cases brought into court by prosecutors result in guilty pleas. However, guilty pleas are often offered based on negotiations to reduce the nature of the charges brought against an offender or for consideration of lighter sentencing decisions, rather than solely on the strength of the investigation. In those very few cases that actually go to a jury or bench trial, most result in convictions. But even they can be appealed and reversed on grounds which may be beyond the control of the investigation process (May et al. 2008; National Center for State Courts 2003).

From a broader perspective, the various filters and outcomes regarding the police investigation process have been described in terms of a criminal justice funnel, as follows (Cole and Smith 2008; May et al. 2008):

Out of 1,000 serious crimes, only about 500 are reported to the police, and about 100 result in arrests.
Roughly 35 of the 100 arrests involve juvenile offenders, who are referred to juvenile authorities for disposition.
About 65 of the 100 arrests are adults that the police refer to prosecutors, and only about 35 are accepted for prosecution.
Five of the 35 accepted cases are not prosecuted for reasons beyond the control of the prosecutor, and the remaining 30 go to trial.
Twenty-three of the 30 plead guilty, four are convicted during trial, and three are acquitted.
Of the 27 convicted offenders, a few may subsequently have their convictions reversed on appeal for legal, technical, or other reasons.

Issues

A fourth predictor of successful investigations is how success is defined. UCR definitions, reporting and technical issues, and prosecution and conviction rates all judge success somewhat differently, and they all include at least some factors that are beyond the ability of investigators to influence. Further, proactive investigations that prevent crimes (e.g., neutralizing serial offenders, drug interdiction, and terrorist activities) are often not included in conventional descriptions of success.

From a community crime control perspective, the criminal justice funnel figures – only 27 convictions (less than 3 %) out of 1,000 crimes committed – may be sobering. However, from the perspective of individuals, the funnel serves as a series of important due process safeguards against the wrongful investigation and conviction of innocent people.

The Future

In sum, four major predictors have been identified as influencing successful police investigations. First, a crime must become known to police, and second, it must not be screened out by them. Third, the investigation style factors used by the police must be legal and accepted by the public. And finally, the different criteria used for evaluating investigative outcomes can alter the definition of investigative success considerably.

The tension between community and individual interests in American society is reflected in the crime control vs. due process description of the criminal justice system and affects the manner in which police investigate crime. The research, clearance rates, and the criminal justice funnel all indicate that the current traditional investigation style is a relatively ineffective approach toward addressing most crimes in the nation, yet the police report no significant problems regarding that style. This suggests a relative balance between community and individual interests regarding the manner in which police deal with crime.

Recent developments regarding community policing and terrorism show that changes to the traditional investigation style can lead to improved Index crime clearance rates and prevent some types of crime. Although the police have used these developments effectively in some areas, they have not fully integrated them into their overall investigative function, and there may be several reasons for this. The changes focus more on the offender-oriented methods that were in the past associated with factors that engendered public acrimony regarding their effects on community and individual interests. Additionally, the downward trend in Index crime rates and the absence of any significant terrorist attacks on American soil during the past few years may tend to minimize the perceived fear of crime by the public over time and heighten public sensitivity to further infringements on personal liberties.

In the past, nationally publicized incidents reflecting negatively on the police have driven public demands to constrain police activities, and it is quite possible that this could occur again in the future (Lasley 1994; Lynch 2001). But, conversely, another catastrophic event like the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could once again suddenly increase demand for even greater community security. In such a situation, it is not hard to imagine an evolution from the Bureaucrat investigator to a more modernized “Community Policing” investigator. This new approach could conceivably expand the traditional investigation style from merely reacting to reported crime to combine a community policing crime prevention approach with more offender-oriented investigation methods. However, while such an approach might improve the overall success of the police criminal investigations process, it would necessarily have to be done in a legally sanctioned and publicly accepted way.

In conclusion, the balance between community and individual interests will probably continue to shape the police criminal investigation process in the future in much the same manner as it has historically. At this point in time, the absence of any significant problems or demand for change indicates that the traditional investigation style will continue as the predominant investigation model. The concept of the Community Policing investigator that was described above will likely remain for the most part relegated to the paperbound confines of research studies, and not become a greater reality on the street until there is a stronger public mandate for it. If and when this should happen, hopefully the guiding research for the development and implementation of more successful investigation strategies will be as prescient going forward as it has been in the past.

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