Please welcome SMFS list member Jim Doherty with the first of several
posts over the next few days as he explains how to research and write police procedurals.
RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL
By
Jim Doherty
Let’s begin by defining our terms.
A police procedural is a piece of crime fiction, in any medium, in which
the main, or at least a major interest is the authentic depiction of the
profession of law enforcement. It’s less
about the crime, or even about the solution of the crime, than it is about how
cops work on the Job.
And maybe, at its best, as Joseph Wambaugh has suggested, it’s about how
the Job works on cops.
To a degree, what I’ll be talking about here is applicable to research
for any mystery, or, for that matter, any piece of fiction. But the police procedural is the only mystery
sub-genre which is defined by its technical
accuracy (or at least by the appearance of technical accuracy). So, for this article, I’m talking about
research in the context of that sub-genre.
God’s in the details, and nowhere is that more true than in the police
procedural, because what’s true for one police force probably won’t be true for
another. Sticking strictly to US
municipal police departments, let’s look at how different things can be.
What’s the official title of the Head of the Force? Certainly “Chief of Police” is the most
common. That’s what the job’s called in
the Los Angeles Police, the San Francisco Police, and the Miami Police, among
thousands of others. But a lot of
big-city departments use the title “Commissioner,” like the New York City Police,
the Baltimore Police, and the Philadelphia
Police; “Superintendent,” like the
Chicago Police, or the New Orleans Police; “Director,” like the Memphis Police
or the Trenton, NJ, Police, “Colonel” like the St. Louis Metro Police or the Providence,
RI, Police; even “Sheriff,” like the Las Vegas Metro Police (a consequence of
the Clark County Sheriff’s Office and the Las Vegas City Police merging back in
the ‘70’s).
What are local stations called? “Precincts,”
as in NYPD or Detroit Chicago Honolulu Oklahoma Houston Atlanta
What are plainclothes officers assigned to criminal investigation
called? “Detective,” of course, as used
in NYPD, Chicago PD, Seattle PD, and hundreds of others, is the most common
title. But some, like the Rochester , NY
More than likely your cop’s going to be investigating a murder. What’s the branch assigned to murder
investigation called? The Homicide Squad,
as in the Pittsburgh Houston Washington ,
DC Los Angeles Kansas
City , Kansas Scottsdale , Arizona
Getting the answers to these questions correct is what the police
procedural is all about. And not just
about police work, but anything else that impinges on the story. I started a police novel some years back set
in San Francisco San Francisco County of San Francisco
So how do you avoid those errors?
How do you sweat the details?
There are several ways, and they’ve all worked. Come back tomorrow as I start
explaining the various ways.
Jim Doherty ©2020
A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM
DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local
levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from
college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad
yards. He’s the author of the true crime
collection Just the Facts – True Tales of
Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood
for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of
American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of
hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college
student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short
stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion
given at Killer Nashville. He was,
for several years, the police technical
advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy
comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and
May on 2019. Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia,
written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up
of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with
Captain America
