Roles and Responsibilities of the Investigation team - Police

The roles and responsibilities of the Police

The police team are normally the first officials to attend a crime scene and are the first initial response to the reported crime and determine whether or not a crime has been committed or not. The police force is a constituted system of personal who are empowered to enforce the law and have the responsibility to protect property and limit the amount of civil disorder. The police service also has the role and responsibility to maintain law and order.

With the police being the first response to the crime, they are the first to arrive at the crime scene. The first responsibility the police have upon arrival would be securing the scene and ensuring that no crime scene evidence is contaminated. They may do this by securing the scene with crime scene tape with a warning telling people not to enter. Also when individuals of the police enter the crime scene, they take note of this. This is so there is a log of everyone who entered or left the crime scene when the case goes to court. Another responsibility of the police would be to gather as much information regarding the case as they can. They may do this by collecting witness statements or door-to-door inquiries requesting information. This would help as strong evidence in the case and could lead to a quicker acquittal of a suspect in court. These would be the role and responsibilities of the police in a crime scene.

The police also have different responsibilities in general. These could be patrolling, the police would patrol areas on the lookout for crime as a crime prevention tactic. The police would also arrest individuals as a deterrent for committing crime.

In the Madeleine McCann case that I am looking at, the police service played an important role. The police were the first attending officers to respond to the crime in Portugal. Two officers attended the scene first and performed a brief search around the apartment and around the scene before calling for more officers to attend from the Criminal Police. More officers then attended the scene within 10 minutes of being alerted. More officers attended the scene from this with patrol dogs and later that morning with search and rescue dogs. This shows that in the Madeleine McCann case there were a lot of officers from different fields involved. Police were cancelled their leave and worked weekends with the efforts of trying to locate Madeleine. There were faults with the police service in the Madeleine McCann case. One of the main roles of the first attending officer is to secure off the crime scene which was not done so straight away. It is reported that around 20 people had entered the apartment before the children’s bedroom of where Madeleine was staying was cornered off. An officer had secured the scene off with crime scene tape but then had left the crime scene unattended at 3am. This could have given people the opportunity to enter the room regarding the tape. This could have result in all the evidence of which the apartment and the bedroom contained being contaminated.

The procedures that the police service will carry out will vary dependent on what the crime is. No crime is the same. For example, the police would carry out different actions to an abduction case than they would to a burglary. For example in an abduction case, there may be different services involved in trying to locate the missing person for example detectives or child services who may look into records to find any clues or suggestions as to what happened, where as in a burglary case the police might want to secure the scene off to preserve forensic evidence which could possibly identify who the burglar was. Also with different crimes, the police may require the help from the different services for example the fire brigade or the ambulance service. The police may contact these in a terrorist attack situation and may help assist giving medical attention to injured individuals.