Module Objectives:  

• Students will understand the need for prompt and effective case management.
• Students will understand the need to record policy decisions.
• Students will understand the prioritisation questions.
• Students will understand the individual responsibilities in a major investigation.
• Students will understand the MADES System of case administration.
• Students will understand the SAFCOM Briefing Method.
• Students will have an overview of Investigation Team Management

The Need for Case Management
An investigator has a responsibility to manage and administer the investigation process and ‘product’.

A professional investigator controls an investigation by ensuring that all incoming information, all decisions and all administrative efforts are properly recorded and periodically reviewed.

The administration of an enquiry is dealt with in this chapter, as are the decision-making and prioritisation processes of an investigation.

Policy Decisions
All decisions made during an investigation are subject to immediate scrutiny and review, and to further scrutiny until the investigation is disposed of by a court. In criminal matters the court’s review (in the form of a trial or tribunal) can take place  many years later because of the appeals process and advances in forensic science, but civil justice is another area where the conduct of an investigation can and will be scrutinised. There are also other considerations, e.g. those regarding accounts and data protection issues, which may result in the investigation’s integrity coming under intense examination.

This is the reason why certain decisions (that is, those dealing with why a line of enquiry is or is not followed) are recorded in a Policy Book. The Policy Book is NOT a complete record of the investigation - that record is maintained by use of the Actions File (see post). If an investigation is not serious or complicated enough to justify opening a policy ‘book’ it is still in order to maintain a record of the enquiry on a separate document so that legal advisers can follow the thinking and rationale of the investigator.

Policy books should be maintained by the senior investigator conducting the investigation, and/or by that individual’s immediate assistant.

These investigators will record all policy decisions made in respect of the enquiry, particularly those regarding the seeking of legal advice, community relations, media relations and public disclosure issues. These concerns will always have a bearing on the conduct of an investigation, but will not have a direct bearing on where the enquiry itself is conducted.

All decisions will be placed into the policy book, and dated and timed accordingly. This system protects the individual making the entry from later criticism because hindsight cannot be used against a timed and dated entry in the Policy Book.

Investigators will often be asked in the witness box why they carried out a certain activity, or why they did not. This policy book avoids guesswork answers, and precludes attacks on the basis that the answer itself is the result of hindsight.

The Conduct of the Investigation

Prioritisation Questions
There are three influential questions asked repeatedly during the conduct of an investigation (outside those issues such as discussed in the chapter on scene and incident management, Chapter 9 post).

The questions are;

• What MUST be done now?
• What SHOULD be done now?
• What COULD be done now

Whenever an action is to be taken at the onset of an investigation, if not at later stages when urgency is no longer a major issue, these three questions should be asked.

In any investigation, the ‘must do’s’ will take precedence. For example, forensic issues at the immediate scene of an incident are the ‘musts’ that need to be addressed before anything else if the integrity of forensic exhibits is to be of any value. In a major crime, a suspect’s presence may present an investigator with a ‘must do’ – effect an arrest to preserve evidence.

It should be stressed, here, that the ‘musts’ have to be acted upon immediately (or as soon as practicable), but the results of those activities need not be waited for prior to other actions being taken. Following completion of the must do’s, the ‘should do’s’ need to be carried out, or addressed.

Take a potential murder scene, and the actions that may be representative of the three prioritisation questions identified above.

On arrival at the scene, the investigator MUST:

• Preserve the scene
• Attempt to identify an offender
• Isolate and identify potential witnesses
• Ascertain what happened, even if only a brief overview or an informed estimation
• Co-ordinate the response of other investigators and specialists

The investigator SHOULD:

• Arrest a suspect
• Start taking statements or initial notes from witnesses regarding what happened
• Start searching the locality for evidence or suspects
• Allocate a scene loggist
• Start house to house enquiries

The investigator COULD

• Investigate the victim’s criminal history
• Investigate the suspect’s criminal history
• Start considering an interview strategy
• Decide what charges may be brought at the conclusion of the enquiry

The point made here is; everything that has been listed will be actioned at some point in the investigation, but at the murder scene the first tasks listed are the ones that take precedence over all of the others.

Such prioritisation questions can be asked in every investigation, and are not solely the preserve of major enquiries.

Once initial actions have been considered, the administration and execution of the enquiry take place in parallel, as it were. As each action takes place it is documented, and the product administered, all so that the result does not have to be bandaged together from the big pile of paper that will inevitably result. It is the writer’s experience that poorly managed paper evidences a poorly managed investigation, and results in problems at the court stage.

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