Expert: Jack Toomey - 10/16/2007

Question
QUESTION: My name is stephanie, i am from chicago. I'm really interested in becoming an investigator for homicide, and sexual crimes. What are the requirements, and are there many job openings in this field? Is there a lot of competition?

ANSWER: Stephanie,

    Are you aware that in order to possibly obtain a position in homicide that you would be spending years on the street in uniform learning the skills that are necessary to do the job as a homicide investigator?  I get a lot of questions like this from students and most are not aware that it takes years and years to learn all of the necessary skills and that they have to start in uniform.  Its not like on tv or the movies.

  Whether there are openings depends on a lot of things like retirements, transfers, sick leave, and officers losing interest.  So on one department there might be two thousand officers and twenty-five positions in homicide and there might be an opening every year or so while on another department there might be five openings per year.

  It is a long drawn-out process and first you must prove yourself in uniform and then as a station detective before you would even be considered.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: When you say years, meaning 5 years or twenty? It's really what i want to do I love psychology, and especially for sexual crimes I want to get justice for the victims. Does every town have homicide detectives or just major cities i.e. (chicago, New York, Miami)?

Answer
Stephanie,

  There are no national standards for the position of homicide detective.  Almost no one goes into police work believing or even wanting to go into homicide.  It could be ten years or it could be fifteen years.  Who knows?  It depends on such a large number of factors that I can't even begin to tell you.  The politics of policing are things that you can't even begin to understand if you are still a student.  I don't want to ruin your career plans or discourage you but thinking that a love of psychology would have any bearing on your chances to make it to homicide is unrealistic.  I have a feeling that you are getting your idea of homicide from the movies, tv, or books.  Nothing could be further from being realistic.  Homicide detectives investigate every death that happens which includes natural deaths, suicides, accidental deaths, and murders.  In no way, in real life, does working these kind of cases come anywhere close to what you see on televison.

  Large departments have homicide squads.  The smaller departments, say a hundred officers or less, depend on the state police or state bureaus of investigation, to investigate their homicides.

   Like I said before I don't want to discourge you but you have to realize that this is not the easiest job and very, very few cases involve the usage of psychology or using what you learned in college.  What it does require is a knack for talking to people, interviewing witnesses, developing informants, getting confessions from suspects, and common sense.