I Must Have Missed this Law and Order Episode...
October 7, 2015 11:35 AM Subscribe
For fictional purposes, help me understand the structure and workings of a major city police department. Suppose I have a non-profit organization with some offices where we do our work. And one day a group of masked individuals invades our offices with automatic weapons and just shoots the hell out of the place. Who investigates the crime?
Note that nobody is killed - and this was clearly not their purpose as the gunmen could easily have killed many of my helpless, terrified staffers had they wanted to. They just shot the place to bits - files, computers, pretty much everything is just confetti and shredded plastic and assorted debris - and vanished. We are a pretty innocuous organization, not an obvious target of any ideological extremist group, and the attackers left no message or otherwise indicated why they did this. Nobody was killed, so it doesn't seem like to me like the usual procedural crime scene where the homicide detectives show up and take over. Yet it clearly seems to go beyond the level of what uniformed officers would handle themselves by questioning the neighbors and what not. What else is there? Who in the Police Department gets this case?
Note that nobody is killed - and this was clearly not their purpose as the gunmen could easily have killed many of my helpless, terrified staffers had they wanted to. They just shot the place to bits - files, computers, pretty much everything is just confetti and shredded plastic and assorted debris - and vanished. We are a pretty innocuous organization, not an obvious target of any ideological extremist group, and the attackers left no message or otherwise indicated why they did this. Nobody was killed, so it doesn't seem like to me like the usual procedural crime scene where the homicide detectives show up and take over. Yet it clearly seems to go beyond the level of what uniformed officers would handle themselves by questioning the neighbors and what not. What else is there? Who in the Police Department gets this case?
Yeah, the police will assign a detective. There are numerous sub-departments, each of which has their own detectives, not just homicide. If you watched the Wire, you may recall that Lester Freamon was a pawn shop detective at the beginning of the series. Most police forces have some sort of Violent Crimes division.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:21 PM on October 7, 2015
posted by kevinbelt at 1:21 PM on October 7, 2015
It's really going to depend on the city. Almost certainly, there will be one or more detectives involved, not only uniformed officers. But some places divide their detectives up by type of crime (homicide, robbery, etc.) and some divide them up by geographical area, and some do a combination of the two. And the degree to which the squads work together in task forces or ad hoc for certain crimes varies from place to place. If you just want generic "big city," then you can just say "detectives" and name them however you want. If you want to be realistic for a specific big city, I think you need to specify the city.
posted by decathecting at 1:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by decathecting at 1:50 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
In a case like that, in a large city, many police departments have joint task forces with federal level anti-terrorism groups. ATF may also be involved
posted by shenkerism at 2:32 PM on October 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by shenkerism at 2:32 PM on October 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
In a big city uniformed officers are there to keep the peace, write tickets and citations, take initial reports for smaller crimes and stop crimes in progress, etc. The kind of crime investigation you are talking about is not really within uniformed officer's scope unless they are establishing a perimeter or supporting an arrest. Your normal beat cop probably would not be involved in this type of investigation. (It's worth noting that what uniformed officers do really depends on the city - in low population areas you might have a sheriff department where everyone wears a uniform and does beat work and investigative work.)
Investigative work is within the domain of the detective squads. It might also be referred to another agency entirely.
posted by 26.2 at 3:16 PM on October 7, 2015
Investigative work is within the domain of the detective squads. It might also be referred to another agency entirely.
posted by 26.2 at 3:16 PM on October 7, 2015
In every city I've lived in - including both Los Angeles and a town with less than 15,000 residents, this would trigger what I like to think of as the "kitchen soup" response: there'll be several federal agencies (ATF being the most noticeable) and at least one group calling itself a joint task force. Post 2001, a terrorist or gang situation is going to be assumed, so the FBI will also be there. Pretty much the only people not invited to the party are going to be whichever beat officers first showed up.
However, someone will want jurisdiction; in the three largest US cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) I'd bet on the local prosecutor and major crimes unit winning. If they're smaller than Chicago it'll be the federal prosecutor and thus the FBI handling the investigation.
In theory it could end up being state charges, but note how this has played out in Boston with the Tsarnaev case: the state and the locals sit on their charges until the federal case is finished, and they basically just helped the feds in the investigation. Part of this is honestly that regular police departments have a lot to do in terms of actual maintenance of order in the streets - they don't have the resources to devote to anything especially challenging or time-consuming, and they generally aren't that good at hard core "investigation" with ballistics, fingerprints, DNA, etc. Most of the evidence gathered for most crimes just gets stored, for this very reason.
posted by SMPA at 4:30 PM on October 7, 2015
However, someone will want jurisdiction; in the three largest US cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) I'd bet on the local prosecutor and major crimes unit winning. If they're smaller than Chicago it'll be the federal prosecutor and thus the FBI handling the investigation.
In theory it could end up being state charges, but note how this has played out in Boston with the Tsarnaev case: the state and the locals sit on their charges until the federal case is finished, and they basically just helped the feds in the investigation. Part of this is honestly that regular police departments have a lot to do in terms of actual maintenance of order in the streets - they don't have the resources to devote to anything especially challenging or time-consuming, and they generally aren't that good at hard core "investigation" with ballistics, fingerprints, DNA, etc. Most of the evidence gathered for most crimes just gets stored, for this very reason.
posted by SMPA at 4:30 PM on October 7, 2015
(Sources: um, having read quite a few police procedurals, including non-fiction (ex. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets), fiction that draws heavily from real experience in police departments (ex. Close Pursuit by Carsten Stroud and the Carl Houseman novels of Donald Harstad), and fiction from novelists who clearly have some inside knowledge of police work (ex. the Harry Bosch novels of Michael Connelly, who was a crime reporter for over a decade before he was able to write fiction full time).
I'll second decatheting above in that there are a few different ways in which police departments can be structured and organized, so you have some leeway in your fictional world.
the usual procedural crime scene where the homicide detectives show up and take over
There are lots of detectives that are not homicide detectives. Also, "homicide" detectives may not be solely assigned to murders - for example, according to the non-fiction Homicide book I mentioned above, in the 80's & 90's detectives from the Baltimore Homicide squads were also responsible for investigating any unattended deaths (i.e. anyone who dies without being in a situation where a medical professional can officially witness the death) and all officer-involved shooting incidents (even if no-one died), and were often called in for politically sensitive cases, like investigating a series of harassing calls to the mayor's chief of staff.
Most cities will divide the city up geographically, these areas are often called districts or divisions or precincts, often numbered and/or referred to by a common name for the area (ex; pdf map of Cleveland's 3rd District, pdf map of LA's Rampart division.) Each district will have some kind of detective squad associated with the district. Sometimes this detective squad is responsible for investigating almost all crimes that happen in the district, up to and including murder, and sometimes this means that each group of district detectives is further sub-divided into speciality squads (Arson, Auto Theft, Fraud, Narcotics, Robbery, Homicide, so on and so forth.)
Other times the local detectives are only responsible for fairly minor crimes, like breaking and entering or simple muggings, and the more serious crimes are investigated by city-wide detective bureaus, which will almost certainly be organized by speciality. Sometimes all violent person-to-person crimes (murder, assault, robbery) will be investigated by the same group of detectives, often called Major Crimes or Violent Crimes or Crimes Against Persons or Robbery/Homicide, or sometimes there will be further sub-groupings under these organizational headings, with some detectives covering robbery and assault, others covering homicide. (This is how the Baltimore department was organized - major crimes were handled by the city-wide Crimes Against Persons division, with certain squads covering robberies, others auto theft, others homicide.)
Even when most of the investigating is done by the district-level detectives, there will usually be an "elite" group of city-wide detectives (again, divided into specialized squads) who will assist with and/or take over high-profile or especially difficult cases. I.E., when a known drug dealer is shot dead on the corner, the district detectives handle the case; when a city councilman's son is shot dead on the corner, the case goes to detectives in the Homicide section of the city-wide Robbery/Homicide Division. This is how the LAPD seems to be organized currently - see LAPD organizational chart and LAPD Detective Bureau.
In a lot of the fiction I've read, there's often no small amount of territorial wrangling and political maneuvering around the question of when or if the city-wide squads take over from the district detectives. In Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, the "elite" city-wide homicide detectives are mostly portrayed as useless buffoons, willing to briefly show up at a murder scene, contribute nothing of value, leave the precinct detectives to do the real work, and then take credit for solving the case. In Connelly's Bosch novels, Harry Bosch starts as a division-level homicide detective, who often has to fight to keep his cases from being commandeered by the city's elite Robbery/Homicide squad. Later he's promoted to Robbery/Homicide, and then sometimes winds up with cases that don't particularly interest him (at least at first) when someone at the division level is able to convince the higher-ups that a particular case needs the attention of the elite squad - which usually means that the case is a political hot potato, and the division commander doesn't want his division or himself suffering the repercussions if the case goes south.
So. In your fictional scenario (setting aside SMPA's excellent point that anything involving automatic weapons, or mass gunfire, or a seemingly unprovoked attack on a harmless non-profit is likely to quickly draw the attention of Federal law agencies like the ATF and FBI and various Homeland Security groups), the bad guys show up, shoot up the the place, someone calls 911. Uniformed patrol officers show up in a marked police car, take a look around, and quickly realize that this situation is above their pay grade. They radio their patrol shift supervisor on duty that they need detectives on the scene. At that point the uniformed officers' job is to make sure that no-one tampers with the scene or physical evidence, make sure no witnesses or possible perpetrators wander off, and see if anyone needs immediate medical attention. (Uniformed officers questioning neighbors and what not are often not doing it under their own initiative, they're doing it under the direction of a detective.)
So then one or more of the district-level detectives on duty show up and start investigating. What happens next depends on how you've organized your fictional police force - do the district detectives do most of the investigating? Or would they quickly pass the case up the ladder to the city-wide detective bureau? Does your district-level detective belong to a dedicated homicide squad, or is there no such thing at the district level? Having a "homicide" detective heading the investigation wouldn't be out of bounds, as (see way above) "homicide" and/or "robbery" detectives are often viewed as the city's best detectives, so they wind up investigating a variety of cases that may not involve someone actually dying.
Or, drawing on a real-world police force, note that the LAPD has a Major Crimes Division under the Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau rather than the regular Detective Bureau. This Major Crimes Division is authorized to "investigate individuals or groups who plan, threaten, finance, aid, abet, attempt or perform unlawful acts which threaten public safety. Additionally, investigators of Major Crimes Division are committed to preventing individuals or groups from harassing or harming others on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation." That's a pretty vague definition, which certainly suggests to me that the command staff of the LAPD could decide that Major Crimes would investigate your scenario even though there's no obvious terrorist connection.
TL;DR - there are many detectives in a modern urban police force, they may or may not specialize; "homicide" detectives often investigate more than just homicides; many cities have one or more groups of detectives that can be specifically assigned to investigate this sort of incident that doesn't really fit a specific category; and regardless of the fact that the police seem to be rather rigidly organized, in practice the commanding officers have a lot of authority to pretty much assign investigations to whichever detectives (or at least detective division/bureau) they want.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:42 PM on October 8, 2015
I'll second decatheting above in that there are a few different ways in which police departments can be structured and organized, so you have some leeway in your fictional world.
the usual procedural crime scene where the homicide detectives show up and take over
There are lots of detectives that are not homicide detectives. Also, "homicide" detectives may not be solely assigned to murders - for example, according to the non-fiction Homicide book I mentioned above, in the 80's & 90's detectives from the Baltimore Homicide squads were also responsible for investigating any unattended deaths (i.e. anyone who dies without being in a situation where a medical professional can officially witness the death) and all officer-involved shooting incidents (even if no-one died), and were often called in for politically sensitive cases, like investigating a series of harassing calls to the mayor's chief of staff.
Most cities will divide the city up geographically, these areas are often called districts or divisions or precincts, often numbered and/or referred to by a common name for the area (ex; pdf map of Cleveland's 3rd District, pdf map of LA's Rampart division.) Each district will have some kind of detective squad associated with the district. Sometimes this detective squad is responsible for investigating almost all crimes that happen in the district, up to and including murder, and sometimes this means that each group of district detectives is further sub-divided into speciality squads (Arson, Auto Theft, Fraud, Narcotics, Robbery, Homicide, so on and so forth.)
Other times the local detectives are only responsible for fairly minor crimes, like breaking and entering or simple muggings, and the more serious crimes are investigated by city-wide detective bureaus, which will almost certainly be organized by speciality. Sometimes all violent person-to-person crimes (murder, assault, robbery) will be investigated by the same group of detectives, often called Major Crimes or Violent Crimes or Crimes Against Persons or Robbery/Homicide, or sometimes there will be further sub-groupings under these organizational headings, with some detectives covering robbery and assault, others covering homicide. (This is how the Baltimore department was organized - major crimes were handled by the city-wide Crimes Against Persons division, with certain squads covering robberies, others auto theft, others homicide.)
Even when most of the investigating is done by the district-level detectives, there will usually be an "elite" group of city-wide detectives (again, divided into specialized squads) who will assist with and/or take over high-profile or especially difficult cases. I.E., when a known drug dealer is shot dead on the corner, the district detectives handle the case; when a city councilman's son is shot dead on the corner, the case goes to detectives in the Homicide section of the city-wide Robbery/Homicide Division. This is how the LAPD seems to be organized currently - see LAPD organizational chart and LAPD Detective Bureau.
In a lot of the fiction I've read, there's often no small amount of territorial wrangling and political maneuvering around the question of when or if the city-wide squads take over from the district detectives. In Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, the "elite" city-wide homicide detectives are mostly portrayed as useless buffoons, willing to briefly show up at a murder scene, contribute nothing of value, leave the precinct detectives to do the real work, and then take credit for solving the case. In Connelly's Bosch novels, Harry Bosch starts as a division-level homicide detective, who often has to fight to keep his cases from being commandeered by the city's elite Robbery/Homicide squad. Later he's promoted to Robbery/Homicide, and then sometimes winds up with cases that don't particularly interest him (at least at first) when someone at the division level is able to convince the higher-ups that a particular case needs the attention of the elite squad - which usually means that the case is a political hot potato, and the division commander doesn't want his division or himself suffering the repercussions if the case goes south.
So. In your fictional scenario (setting aside SMPA's excellent point that anything involving automatic weapons, or mass gunfire, or a seemingly unprovoked attack on a harmless non-profit is likely to quickly draw the attention of Federal law agencies like the ATF and FBI and various Homeland Security groups), the bad guys show up, shoot up the the place, someone calls 911. Uniformed patrol officers show up in a marked police car, take a look around, and quickly realize that this situation is above their pay grade. They radio their patrol shift supervisor on duty that they need detectives on the scene. At that point the uniformed officers' job is to make sure that no-one tampers with the scene or physical evidence, make sure no witnesses or possible perpetrators wander off, and see if anyone needs immediate medical attention. (Uniformed officers questioning neighbors and what not are often not doing it under their own initiative, they're doing it under the direction of a detective.)
So then one or more of the district-level detectives on duty show up and start investigating. What happens next depends on how you've organized your fictional police force - do the district detectives do most of the investigating? Or would they quickly pass the case up the ladder to the city-wide detective bureau? Does your district-level detective belong to a dedicated homicide squad, or is there no such thing at the district level? Having a "homicide" detective heading the investigation wouldn't be out of bounds, as (see way above) "homicide" and/or "robbery" detectives are often viewed as the city's best detectives, so they wind up investigating a variety of cases that may not involve someone actually dying.
Or, drawing on a real-world police force, note that the LAPD has a Major Crimes Division under the Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau rather than the regular Detective Bureau. This Major Crimes Division is authorized to "investigate individuals or groups who plan, threaten, finance, aid, abet, attempt or perform unlawful acts which threaten public safety. Additionally, investigators of Major Crimes Division are committed to preventing individuals or groups from harassing or harming others on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation." That's a pretty vague definition, which certainly suggests to me that the command staff of the LAPD could decide that Major Crimes would investigate your scenario even though there's no obvious terrorist connection.
TL;DR - there are many detectives in a modern urban police force, they may or may not specialize; "homicide" detectives often investigate more than just homicides; many cities have one or more groups of detectives that can be specifically assigned to investigate this sort of incident that doesn't really fit a specific category; and regardless of the fact that the police seem to be rather rigidly organized, in practice the commanding officers have a lot of authority to pretty much assign investigations to whichever detectives (or at least detective division/bureau) they want.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:42 PM on October 8, 2015
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posted by Etrigan at 11:45 AM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]