Tangentially-on-topic, the report took me back in a timely way given his death this week to the late Ian Bair's study 'Investigating Rape', pub Police Foundation 1985. Was it not Blair who advocated the suspect-centric approach, working with other agencies, and coupling to strategies to minimise investigative trauma to victims? Forty years is a long stretch for so little progress to have been made and sustained.
On the basis of Joshua’s summary of the Chief Inspector’s report, I I rather agree with Michael George.
As to post mortems, on acquittals I very much understood from my opponents and from robing room exchanges generally that these were common, searching but also with a hint and more of “blame game” attached. If so then that would surely be the reverse of helpful.
Throughout 47 years of practice, I did sometimes find myself returning to the oft-cited mischief of the police “case theory”. Drawing on, of course, valuable experience and intuition, investigating police officers may well - however diligently they strive to avoid it- go with the highly promising first impression, and then the (very human) inclination is to focus on those strands of intelligence which lend weight to that first direction of travel and make one inclined to dismiss as secondary intelligence and evidence which ought in hindsight to have nudged the thinking investigations on to a different tack.
What is wrong with the -yes- old way of appraising a case by trying to fault the underlying theory
What is missing from this review is any explanation of why the failures occurred. CPS will have done a post mortem and we ought to know if these were failures by individuals or were systemic.
Tangentially-on-topic, the report took me back in a timely way given his death this week to the late Ian Bair's study 'Investigating Rape', pub Police Foundation 1985. Was it not Blair who advocated the suspect-centric approach, working with other agencies, and coupling to strategies to minimise investigative trauma to victims? Forty years is a long stretch for so little progress to have been made and sustained.
On the basis of Joshua’s summary of the Chief Inspector’s report, I I rather agree with Michael George.
As to post mortems, on acquittals I very much understood from my opponents and from robing room exchanges generally that these were common, searching but also with a hint and more of “blame game” attached. If so then that would surely be the reverse of helpful.
Throughout 47 years of practice, I did sometimes find myself returning to the oft-cited mischief of the police “case theory”. Drawing on, of course, valuable experience and intuition, investigating police officers may well - however diligently they strive to avoid it- go with the highly promising first impression, and then the (very human) inclination is to focus on those strands of intelligence which lend weight to that first direction of travel and make one inclined to dismiss as secondary intelligence and evidence which ought in hindsight to have nudged the thinking investigations on to a different tack.
What is wrong with the -yes- old way of appraising a case by trying to fault the underlying theory
.
What is missing from this review is any explanation of why the failures occurred. CPS will have done a post mortem and we ought to know if these were failures by individuals or were systemic.