The police investigative function is a key component of the criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and investigative failures can cause significant and long-lasting damage at all levels of society. These failures are typically the product of multiple interconnected factors, which can be generally grouped into structural, organizational, and personal categories. Using network analysis, we explore the relationships between the causal factors associated with investigative failures in 50 murder and rape cases, most of them wrongful convictions. We identified 40 different causal factor types. Some of these functioned as catalysts (initiators that cascaded into other causal factors), some as brokers (bridges between factors), and others as products (the end result of the causal factor chain). Understanding the architecture of the network – its components and relationships – provides a means for mitigating the risk of criminal investigative failures.
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