Conclusions

This final chapter draws together findings from the studies on incident solvability, its relationship with resources and the issues faced by police officers in improving crime detection outcomes. It contains a review of the importance of different categories of solvability factors for detecting different types of crime and the ways they combine to enable this, including an assessment of the levels of variation in detection outcomes that may be explained and predicted. There is also a critical evaluation of crime seriousness and balancing the waste of resources due to investigating groups of low-solvability cases against the loss of detections if their investigation is discontinued; the implications of offender prolificacy and versatility; of the particular problems posed by cybercrime; rapid response and directed patrol; the issues relating to geographical variations in crime type incidence, solvability and the provision of investigative resources; changes in the effective use of investigative capacity; and the need for research into which policing and investigative activities should be applied to particular subsets of cases in different investigative stages in order to improve effective capacity utilisation and cost-effectively raise detection outcomes. There is an evaluation of the scientific approach to investigating and solving crime, advocated in this volume, in complementing police experience. This highlights the importance of solvability factor analysis in promoting better use of investigative capacity and in making substantial contributions to what may be termed ‘lean policing’, an approach which aims to secure the most cost-effective outcomes from available resource inputs.