Tag: Investigations

Unlike in the private sector, candidates for promotion or special assignment in police agencies, especially in smaller departments, may get only a couple of opportunities over their entire career. Police ...

Early in my undercover career, I shot and killed an armed assailant. In the immediate aftermath of this traumatic encounter, I paused and focused with tunnel vision on the dead ...

During my career as a detective, it was not uncommon to see bite marks on rape and child-abuse victims. However, I encountered only a couple of occasions where forensic dentistry ...

New technology constantly provides new challenges and opportunities for evidence gathering. The forensics unit of your department handles all the electronic data recovery for computers and cellular phones. By working ...

Criminal investigation requires extensive knowledge of the evidentiary value of the physical evidence associated with firearms. In the vast majority of homicide cases, the victim is killed with a gun. ...

No matter how computer literate you get, eventually you’ll stumble over something you find difficult. For me, it’s graphics. I don’t mean tweaking photographs or even editing video. I can ...

Dear Bullethead:

With an obvious kinship to Heckler & Koch's successful Universal Self-Loading Pistol (USP), the simply named HK .45 is a marriage of the USP and the firm's more streamlined P-2000 ...

Show me an officer making many good, prosecutable cases on a routine basis, and I will show you an officer utilizing criminal intelligence and information. Show me an officer networking ...

It's been 17 years since the publication of Contact & Cover: Two-Officer Suspect Control, which I co-authored with now-retired Lieutenant John Morrison of the San Diego Police Department (SDPD). I'm ...