If you put a step wrong in one of these big cases, you will be guilty for Hell freezing over. (Sarah Payne, mother of murdered schoolgirl Sara Payne, 2006)1
Human decision making is a complex phenomenon influenced to varying degrees by a plethora of different variables present at any one given moment. What leads to making a specific decision is often (but not always) influenced, for example, by various contextual, situational, personality, experience and levels of knowledge factors, to name but few. If one considers how evolution has bestowed us humans not simply with brains capable of instant decision making , often referred to as “system one thinking” or “intuition” (e.g. Kahneman 2011) but, should we wish, an ability to engage in more deliberate and thoughtful “system two” decision making (Kahneman 2011), considered “rational thought” by some, for example, whether to follow the satnav directions to the letter, or to ignore its help and follow your own sense of direction and is consistently responsible for the second writer arriving late at most meetings. With all this noise, understanding how decision making occurs is highly complex and far from an exact science and is exemplified no better than when attempting to study decision making in an occupation as complex as policing. The modern police officer, for example, has to contend with a range of concerns before making a decision. The decision making process can be influenced by a unique blend of legal, moral and procedural demands, mixed with community expectations and the reality of the resources available to them. Every police officer has to make a multitude of decisions on a daily basis, some will be minor and routine and relatively inconsequential, but some will be life-changing or life-saving for officer, public or both, irrespective of rank or role. The First officer at a crime scene, for example, must decide how to best preserve evidence which could lead to a conviction, then later may be called to attend a critical incident such as a suspected arson, before helping to defuse a violent situation and all in a day’s work. Google “what’s an unpredictable job” and police officer will most likely be in the top ten answers offered.
The central question on which this book rests is simply: are police decision makers different from other decision makers in what might be considered to be high risk “critical” (often life or death) situations, for example, hospital doctors, firefighters and soldiers, and if so how do they generally make, and what do they base, investigative decisions in what are termed “critical incidents”? In order to suitably explore this question, we seek to identify what investigative and investigator decision making might be, along with the major internal and external features which influence police investigative decision making in critical incident situations. We seek to shed some light on what Agatha Christie’s famous fictional Belgian Detective, Hercule Poirot, refers to as “the little grey cells”, but really relates to how police investigators make decisions in critical (in Poirot’s sense murder) investigations.
The independent nature of the police officers decision making was highlighted in a 1955 legal case where Viscount Simmons (Attorney General -v- New South Wales Perpetual Trustees Co [1955] AC 457) stated that a constable is an officer whose “authority is original, not delegated, and is exercised at their own discretion by virtue of their office”.
Arguably, police officers still have a large degree of autonomy in the decisions that they make, for example, whether to give a ticket to someone driving a car with a faulty tail-light or to simply point it out to the driver and accept their promise that they will get it fixed as soon as possible. This is often referred to as “officer discretion”, although some would argue that that the abundance of police guidance and procedures in recent years have all but eroded the space for officer discretion, it is a debate for another day and not visited here. We will content ourselves in this book simply to explore wider decision making involved in criminal investigations and other critical incidents.
What factors influence police decision making have long been debated and include environmental factors, legal restraints, organisational factors, politics and situational factors to name but few. Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner opined in his 1978 autobiography that every senior officer has five masters:
- 1.The criminal law
- 2.The police authority (now the Police and Crime Commissioners)
- 3.The staff that they command
- 4.The public of their district
- 5.His/her conscience.
Although published in the last century (1978) it can be argued that the five “masters” still stands as an accurate reflection on which the police chief (and any officer) is responsible to.
In more extreme cases, police officers will have little choice but to decide on the “least bad” option in dealing with a critical incident, for example, with a suspected suicide bomber. In the murder case of Becky Godden in Gloucestershire in 2011, for example, the senior detective in charge of the case took the decision to proceed with the suspect (Haliwell) despite not cautioning him first. As a consequence of his actions he then found another victim’s body, but at court he was criticised for not giving adequate cautions under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to the suspect, Haliwell. Bizarrely, the second murder case was dismissed at court. The Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) in this case decided that the benefits outweighed the disadvantages despite legal guidance. Police decision making relies on professional judgement backed by training and legal constraints.
Retired DCI Steve Driscoll (BBC Stephen Lawrence programme, transmitted 19 April 2018) stated that he “cleared the ground” when he took over the investigation in 2009. This entails thoroughly retracing the steps of the previous investigations and ensuring all avenues of investigation have been exhausted before commencing on new lines of enquiry. The original murder investigation began in April 1993. DCI Driscoll found statements and read through them all and found that the original contact between the suspects and the victim was longer than first thought. He then asked the Forensic Laboratory to reinvestigate certain exhibits and he succeeding in acquiring enough evidence for a retrial of the 2 of the suspects who were found guilty and sentenced in 2012. By “double checking” every available piece of investigation , DCI Driscoll was able to launch a fresh examination of the forensic material which acted as a catalyst to the investigation.
West and Donnelly in Chapter 7 talk of the acquisition of knowledge and good coppering ’ versus human factors, they too talk of timeliness along with the phases and pressures of homicide investigation today. They talk of “getting a grip of the investigation” (pp. 117 and 118 of Chapter 7), a complaint made by the (Flanagan) HMIC report into the running of the investigation into the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. Stuart Kirby in his book “Effective Policing” (2015) discusses the principle of “clearing the ground beneath your feet “in an investigation (p. 108). This issue arose in both the Soham murders and the hunt for schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s murderer, Levi Bellfield, in Surrey. Kirby suggests three main issues raised by both investigations:
- 1.Management of information
- 2.Prioritisation of leads
- 3.“Lack of grip ” of the investigation
All arguably illustrate the flawed decision making inherent in the two cases highlighted.
The main purpose of this book is to identify and explore some of the common characteristics of police decision making in major enquires and critical incidents. Lawrence Sherman (1998) notes the importance of “evidence-based policing” by emphasising the fact that there is little empirical evidence to guide most policing practices—at least this was the case back in 1998. Research on the decision making of criminal investigators is however at best “emergent” and at worst neglected, has tended to focus on particular aspects of the investigative process such as “interviewing suspects a...