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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a “maintenance pathway” for ensuring a low false negative rate in closing investigations unlikely to lead to a clearance (detection).

A randomised controlled experiment testing solvability factors for non-domestic cases of minor violence.

A random selection of 788 cases, of which 428 would have been screened out, were sent forward for full investigation. The number of cases actually detected was 22. A total of 19 of these were from the 360 recommended for allocation. This represents an improvement of accuracy over the original tests of the model three years earlier.

This study shows how the safety of an investigative triage tool can be checked on a continuous basis for accuracy in predicting the cases unlikely to be solved if referred for full investigations.

This safety check pathway means that many more cases can be closed after preliminary investigations, thus saving substantial time for working on cases more likely to yield a detection if sufficient time is put into the cases.

More offenders may be caught and brought to justice by using triage with a safety backstop for accurate forecasting.

This is the first published study of a maintenance pathway based on a random selection of cases that would otherwise not have been investigated. If widely applied, it could yield far greater time for police to pursue high-harm, serious violence.

We present the results of one of the only in-depth studies of a police agency’s internal and external response to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (COVID-19). This study emphasizes the importance of law enforcement agencies conducting comprehensive case studies and after-action assessments to prepare, prevent and respond to prolonged public health crises and showcases the profound (and lingering) effects of COVID-19 on police organizations.

This multi-method case study combines document analysis, a workforce survey, a community survey, interviews and analysis of administrative data to detail and assess the agency’s internal and operational responses to the pandemic and the reactions of employees and community members to those responses.

Despite agency strategies to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, employees cited very high stress levels one year after the pandemic and a third of sworn officers considered leaving the policing profession altogether during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several policies intended by the agency to protect employee health and maintain staffing needs kept workforce levels steady but may have increased feelings of organizational injustice in both sworn and non-sworn individuals, with variation across racial and gender groups. A jurisdiction-wide community survey indicated general support for the police department’s responses but a preference for in-person rather than telephone-based responses to service calls. Officers, however, preferred continuing remote responses even after the pandemic subsided.

To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the only in-depth case studies that examine a police agency’s internal and external responses to COVID-19 and the sworn, non-sworn and community reactions to those responses.