Effective Detective

COMBINATION OF SKILLSthat can arise from poor performance in this area. As a result, the opportunities forcorrecting poor performance without serious longer-term consequences are morelimited than many other management sectors. For instance, the Macpherson report(1999) highlights how weaknesses in investigative management skills canundermine the whole criminal justice process. For investigators to apply skillseffectively in investigative management requires a combination of managementskills and, critically, underpinning knowledge of the complexities of theinvestigative process.Investigative abilityDuring the investigative process, the SIO is often assimilating incominginformation and drawing inferences from that information. The information andinferences together are then used to generate lines of enquiry, which may in turngenerate more information. The SIO, with support from the investigative team, isthen responsible for the continual analysis of the relevance and importance of thatnew information to the original inferences, either refining it or having to developalternatives (Adhami and Browne, 1996). Five skill areas were classified under theheading of investigative ability: investigative competence; appraisal of incominginformation; adaptation; strategic awareness; and, innovative investigative style.Knowledge levelsThe majority of those interviewed stressed the importance of an ‘effective’ SIOhaving relevant knowledge. Investigative procedures, the legal and court processes,how to deal with informants and knowing what is available to the SIO were alloffered as examples of types of knowledge that an SIO should possess.From the interviews, it is clear that an ‘effective’ SIO has to embrace a wide rangeof roles within a serious crime investigation – detective, counsellor, accountant,scientist and an administrator amongst others. Figure 4 illustrates how the analysisof the data indicated that a balance of management skills (people, generalmanagement skills and those relating to the investigative process), investigativeability and relevant knowledge would all appear to be essential elements of therole.26