Researching police procedure and crime scenes for crime novels

I'm often asked how I research my crime novels and in particular the police procedure and crime scene investigation side of things. I'm not married to a police officer or a former police officer (although I am married to a former fire-fighter) so I don't have inside knowledge except when it comes to fires, burnt bodies and serious traffic and other incidents which fire fighters attend, and these can all be incorporated into a crime novel, which indeed I have done.

So where do I get the police procedural information from and how can writers obtain this kind of information? 

When I first created the enigmatic, flawed and rugged DI Andy Horton I approached Hampshire Police (the county in which my novels are set) and asked if I could visit the police station and talk to some police officers in CID and in what was then the Vice Squad. Hampshire Police were brilliant. They let me visit them twice even though I wasn't then published. That gave me some basic background which I have since built on and now I know many police officers and those in civilian jobs attached to the police service.

The police websites, both the regional and national ones, are also a very good source of information for writers and there is considerable information on the Crown Prosecution Services website. 

It's also worth following the police on Twitter. There are many official feeds from the various police units as well as from individual police officers.

I have also run an event called CSI Portsmouth  and CSI Southampton where I bring crime authors, police and crime experts together to  debate crime fiction and crime fact. This year CSI Southampton is being held on Saturday 28 October 2017 and along with myself and crime author Elly Griffith there will be a detective inspector from Hampshire police, the head of the crime scene officers and the fingerprint bureau.

There are also blogs run by serving police officers and ex-coppers, some of whom run courses for writers. A search on the Internet can help you find these.  And the Crime Writers' Association of which I am a member  also have a very useful website called the Crime Readers Association for crime fiction fans along with useful blogs, articles and information for budding crime writers.

Of course my crime novels cannot truly reflect real police procedure because if they did they would end up reading like a police manual and bore everyone to tears.  So the basics are then spiced up and tweaked  by my imagination.

One of the problems with writing contemporary crime novels is that the police service in the UK is continually being re-organised by the government which means that no sooner do I mention a department than its name changes or it merges with another.  It is not possible to be a hundred percent correct on this but they were correct at the time of writing.

I'm grateful to Hampshire Police for their help and patience and for being so generous in giving their time.

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This article was originally published in 2014 and has been updated.