The Investigation Plan

The third stage in the investigative process is the investigation plan.  The investigation plan is a very important part of the investigation process as it allows the police to identify and gather as much information as possible which will heavily influence the chance of a suspect being linked to the scene of the crime. Once that all the the evidence that was available has been bagged and tagged then it can be used by the police to get a better overall view of what had happened in the crime scene which will also help when trying to place someone at the scene of the crime. During this process police will also examine the area that the crime had took place, for example, they would question the people in that neighborhood t see if they knew or have any idea about who could have committed this crime. This has been proven as very useful as in many other crimes that have been committed in a town or city, the people living there usually have a good idea who may have committed the crime as this has been shown in recent investigations. in this part the police would also have to compare the crime that has took place with other crimes that had already been committed in that area to see if there is any correlation which might push them more towards a certain suspect.

OJ Simpson:

Due to the police not creating an incident room it made the investigation plan much harder as they did not have an area in which they could properly plan the investigation which meant they did not have a clear idea of how they where going to tackle the case. Due to the police also targeting OJ Simpson as the person who committed the crime and did not look into the chance of someone else committing the murder they started to plan the investigation only around him, by doing this they only started looking for evidence that could be linked to OJ and they only took statements about OJ aswell, they did not want to think about whether he was framed or set up, everything that they did revolved around accusing OJ Simpson of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. From the very beginning of the investigation it was not planned out correctly and this started with the SOCO team whose job was to collect the evidence left at the crime, which was planned out extremely badly, the First attending officer at the crime scene was Robert Riske who was joined by Mark Furham who was the first detective at the scene. It was their job to prioritize the evidence and show the SOCO team around the crime scene but as it was unorganized this resulted in a lot of the evidence getting contaminated, and as both Furham and Riske where more bothered about they media than the evidence they started covering it up using towels to stop the tabloids taking photographs, they even covered up the bodies of Nicole and Ronald which completely destroyed most of the evidence that would have been found on the bodies. As the investigation was not planned properly no crime scene tape was deployed around the perimeter of the house to stop people from entering, as there was no tape many people who worked for newspapers walked into the scene taking pictures which also resulted in a lot of evidence being contaminated. If this stage in the investigation was done better then more evidence would have been collected which could have resulted in OJ Simpson actually being charged.