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Perspectives on the Complexity of Criminal Investigations

1.1. Introduction

We all think we understand criminal investigations and often believe ourselves well placed to offer an opinion about them. In our pleasure-seeking society, they are an object of fiction that plays on the imagination. They satisfy our desire for sensations. They reveal the disturbing behavior of human nature and respond to our urge for justice.

A criminal investigation is not, however, made up of the well-worn intellectual and technical apparatus imagined by certain television series or crime novels. Nor is it any more a world of conspiracy or the grim background of detective stories. As its etymology suggests, the media does not insert itself between the spectator and reality, opening up the playing field to a rich and fictitious world. Unencumbered by its modes of representation, of this CSI effect that acts like a fun-house mirror (Borisova et al. 2016), an investigation must be seen as a simultaneously more ordinary and more complex reality. It calls much more for something concrete rather than imaginative thinking.

Even stripped of its fictions, however, our understanding of an investigation remains veiled by several biases. Professionals are not always the best judges of this procedure for seeking truth put into their hands. An investigation is not an intangible and intemporal object whose endpoint is certain and clearly defined. An investigation is much more than that. It can be considered a system that requires numerous disciplines to understand it. Each specialist seems to approach it through the prism of their sole specialty, revealing, one after another, a juridical, forensic, practical, psychological, historical or sociological perception of investigations. Pointing out this compartmentalization, Cusson compares the investigation to a Hydra with three heads: juridical, scientific and strategic (2018). The Canadian criminologist thus underscores a certain measure of reductionism. Based on the propositions of theories of complexity, a holistic, interdisciplinary and complete approach could enrich our understanding of investigative work.

Recent research (Barlatier 2017) has shown that studies on investigations are relatively consistent in terms of the parameters studied and the explanations provided. Observations, at times iconoclastic, formulated 50 years ago by foreign researchers, are finding echoes in France. Investigations thus appear to be dictated by the relatively stable and independent forces of national juridical structures, making it possible to analyze the entire process.

An investigation is a form of information management, not far from the practices of companies. It depends however on unique procedures given the particularities of its object. As a process of reducing uncertainty, an investigation is a complex system whose utility and modus operandi can only be correctly appreciated from without its environment.

1.2. Criminal investigation, a process for reducing uncertainty

An investigation is an information process adapted to the requirements of its time and asserting the manifestation of truth.

1.2.1. A process of information analysis

Seen from its principal objective, an investigation is a process designed to gather useful information. Returning to this essential characteristic, it seems relevant to us to look toward the American brand of pragmatic philosophy. One of its principal thinkers, the American philosopher John Dewey, thinks that we find cognitive experiences, reflective and intentional, beyond organic experiences and reflexes. He uses "investigation" to designate the structured means of knowing applicable to all areas of human action and wherever reason is applied.

Dewey considers an investigation to be a "cognitive matrix" whose purpose is to resolve problems. It constitutes the transition from an uncertain, clouded or chaotic situation, on one end, to a coherent and unified situation, on the other. This transformation operation relies on an initial diagnostic, as well as on the validation of causes for the given consequences (testability). Philosophy insists on the fact that this process is not part of a theoretical model. Its validity comes from facing the unexpected and the accidents of reality (Dewey 1938).

This vision portrays an investigation as a heuristic where we have, successively, the diagnosis of the problem, the collection of useful information, reasoning and the elaboration of solutions that are compared with the reality of facts. It is therefore an attempt to elucidate an enigmatic situation using the tools provided by reason.

The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Dewey's colleague, thinks that an investigation does not necessarily seek truth but consists primarily of overcoming doubt in order to move into action. To this effect, referring to Aristotle, Peirce tests the elementary inferences of logic (induction, deduction and especially abduction) and their combinations in the context of a hypothetical-deductive strategy (Peirce 1903).

The postulates of pragmatic philosophy in America can be expressed using the concrete aspects of theories on decision-making, and notably those on the limits of rationality developed by the Nobel laureate in economy, Herbert Simon. In the context of complex decisions, such as the ones required by an investigation, our choices are not guided by absolute and optimal rationality.

Being as close as possible to the reality of the choices that agents face requires us to consider our decisions as programmed, habitual and repetitive. When we are invited to do something new, there is a limitation of choosing the solutions that offer a minimal satisfaction (Simon 1983).

In this imperfect context, agents rely on simple and efficient heuristics to manage information and find solutions. Such is the case of the "information cycle" that situates the acquisition of knowledge in a retroactive loop where the identification of the problem is followed by the collection of data, the organization of information and the analysis and implementation of results. Known by all specialists of information science, this simple process allows for a simultaneously supple and structured approach for analyzing information, oriented toward a production of knowledge that can lead to action. Such is the mission of the investigator.

Philosophers and economists thus help us grasp the fundamentals of the work of an investigator in a concrete way and with a new perspective. They prompt us to see it as a part of information sciences, a shift that moves us from the realm of the uncertain to that of the explainable. An investigation consists of mitigating the loss and distortion of data through an apparatus of optimal collection.

Addressing this issue implies turning toward theories of information. Wilmer (1970) thus considers that within the context of an investigation, a police officer and a criminal work against each other in a "battle of information" where the hope of the former to optimize available information is opposed to the intention of the latter to reduce his area of exposure.

As the fruit of antagonistic forces, each investigation is thus characterized by a unique information profile (Stelfox 2009). The investigator's art is therefore to optimize and reconstruct the past through the collection of information, at times obvious, often sibylline. It is a kind of struggle against the progressive erosion of information caused by circumstances, time or the countermeasures of the offender. The investigator is thus an information manager, a "welder of knowledge". He does a job that is relatively ordinary, compared to many other professions. Particularly emblematic, however, his mission includes unique characteristics that cannot be ignored. Police officers are often described by sociologists as bureaucratic soldiers whose work is organized in a military fashion, hierarchical and bureaucratic (Bittner 1970). Among them, the specificity of the investigator is sometimes underscored. He is a kind of romantic bureaucrat aspiring toward independence (Sanders 1977).

In a general sense, criminology and particularly the sociology of penal institutions contribute to the demystification of the realities of investigative work - reactive, formal, habitual and underperforming (Greenwood et al. 1977). The investigator is seen as an agent with a large amount of discretionary power who aspires to professional independence with respect to his bosses (Skolnick 1966). An "inverted hierarchy" seems to hide the reality of the power that field agents have (Muchielli 2004). Investigative work thus appears to be done by the lower level agents, with little transparency, using judgments based on the social constructs that come from policing culture and crippled with biases as their starting point (Mc Conville et al. 1991). Investigations apparently also contribute to our understanding of what a crime is, as a social construct (Ericson 1981). They are therefore compelled to evolve with society.

1.2.2. A process adapted to the needs of its time

Regarding the investigations by Oedipus into the evils experienced by the inhabitants of Thebes at the hands of Damien, Foucault helps us reflect on the meaning of the penal process and the discursive strategies associated with it (Foucault 1975, 1994, 2012).

An investigation blends in with its time....