The temporal order of retrospective burglary and robbery criminal investigations: An exploratory ‘black box’ analysis

In the absence of empirical knowledge, public expectations of criminal investigations have been largely informed by fictional and/or dramatised depictions of detective work. To address this issue, incident report data from 243 retrospective burglary and robbery cases were paired with self-report surveys from 40 detectives who indicated the activities and the date they performed them for each of the cases they were assigned. The results suggest that the temporal order of retrospective burglary and robbery criminal investigations is more nuanced than previously acknowledged. Policy implications and areas of future research are discussed from these findings