Incident Room

The fourth stage of the investigative process is the incident room. An incident room is essentially a base set up by the police who are investigating a murder, the room is set up in close proximity to where the crime had originally taken place. An incident room is usually a joint operation between the police and the people living in the town as they both want the same thing, for the person who committed the crime to get caught. The people in the town provide the room for the police and usually bring round food and drinks to the working police officers. Many different things can happen in the incident room such as analysis of evidence, group meetings, statements from the public and interrogations. The room would be ran by a group of highly trained individuals known as a major investigations team but the room would be continuously monitored by police to make sure that no evidence is tampered or messed with.

OJ Simpson:

In the OJ Simpson case there was no incident room used at any part of the investigation. The reason that there was no incident room used during the OJ Simpson case is because the police force who investigated the case had their minds set from the beginning that OJ was the person who had killed Ronald Goldman and Nicole Simpson, which meant that they where very naive when thinking about who committed the crime  as they would only take statements and evidence that was related to OJ Simpson in some way. By not having an incident room during the length of the case it meant they where not only unorganized as they did not have a clear base but also they could not get as many public statements, group meetings where harder to arrange and all of the evidence found could not be analysed in one place which aided the chance of evidence being lost or contaminated (which a lot of the evidence found at the crime scene was). As there was not a clear place for the police force to have meetings about the case it meant that a lot of information known by officers was not shared around which made it harder for the higher authority figures to get an overview of where the investigation was it. By not having an incident room the case became efficient and it took longer for the police to do basic things such as take calls and interrogate suspects.