Mark,
Re your question below:
> Last night I saw Jean Pierre Melville's Le
Samourai.
> During a climactic
> scene, the police follow Alain Delon through
the
> Metro. The chief
> investigator of a single murder has assigned
50,
> count 'em, 50 cops to
> the task. They lose him, of course, though
they
> catch up to him just in
> time.
>
> There were probably 50 cops assigned to
the
> kidnapping in Kurosawa's
> High and Low, too.
>
> Granted, these were foreign films, but I seem
to
> remember similar
> amounts of manpower being devoted to single cases
in
> old US films
> (though I can't think of a specific example).
Was
> this ever close to
> reality, that that many cops would be devoted to
a
> single case, no
> matter how high profile?
>
> High and Low was based on McBain's King's
Ransom.
> In that book, a
> handful of cops, along with help from various
crime
> scene and lab
> investigators handled the case. McBain is known
for
> his meticulous
> handling of police procedure, so I'm guessing
that's
> far closer to the
> truth. In these days of budgetary concerns,
I'm
> betting it's even less.
> How many cops are actually assigned (as opposed
to
> watching out and/or
> giving occasional assistance) to a redball, as
they
> call high profile
> cases in Homicide?
The answer to your question is, it all depends. It depends on
which agencies (or, occasionally, agencies) has (or,
occasionally, shares) ultimate jurisdiction, how many
resources that department can bring to the case, what else is
going on in the department at that time, etc.
With regards to LE SAMOURI, my impression, from my one visit
to France (which was exclusively in Paris) is that there's a
higher cop-to-citizen ratio than in the US. I remember being
surprised by the number of uniformed cops on duty in Gare du
L'Est (forgive me if that's misspelled), one of the large
train stations in Paris. There seemed to be far more cops on
duty there than I typically see in, say, Grand Central
Station in NYC or Union Station in Chicago. So the number of
cops in that pursuit may very well reflect the reality.
My impression is that Japan also has a very high
cop-to-citizen ratio. And they have a much lower crime rate.
So it wouldn't surprise me if a ransom kidnapping,
particularly in 1963, got massive amounts of manpower
committed exclusively to the case.
In Great Britain, according to cop-novelist John Wainwright,
homicide investigations are rarely conducted at less than
"Chief Inspector" level. A detective chief inspector would be
roughly (and the operative word there is "roughly")
equivalent to a captain of detectives in an American police
force. In a big city police force in the US, a captain of
detectives would very rarely be a lead investigator on a
case. He administer dozens of other detectives. Case
detectives are usually officers who would be equivalent to
detective sergeants or detective constables in Britain. A
sergeant or constable would almost never be the lead
investigator on a murder case in Britain. He'd be somebody
who was committed to perform certain tasks or gather specific
information, then turn it over to the lead investigator. And
there's often dozens of cops assigned to a single murder in
Britain.
On the other hand, in a smaller US department, with a much
lower caseload, a command or management-level detective might
be more of a hands-on investigator than his big-city
counterpart normally gets a chance to be. But there wouldn't
be as much manpower to bring into play. The guy who was most
responsible for nailing John Wayne Gacy was the chief of
detectives for the Des Plaines Police, but his entire
detective division was probably smaller than a precinct
detective squad in NYC, with, presumably, less experience in
homicide cases, so it wasn't odd to see the top-ranking
detective become a working detective in that case, because
that's what was needed. He didn't have a limitless pool to
draw from and had to be a street level cop as well as an
administrator.
McBain in KING'S RANSOM may be said to have emphasized the
role his 87th Precinct detectives played in that case. He
might even be said to have taken some artistic license to
make the role his characters would play larger than it might
be in real life. It's possible, for example that, in real
life, the main responsibility for the case would not have
been the precinct squad but some downtown specialty squad. It
seems to me that I once heard that, in NYPD (and McBain's
department is based on the NYPD, notwithstanding his claim
that the city is
"fictional"), the Safe, Loft, & Truck Squad had
responsibility for kidnapping investigations, though I've
also heard that the Safe, Loft, & Truck Squad has since
been disbanded, so I'm not sure who'd handle it now. Another
point is that, at the time KING'S RANSOM was written, the FBI
could not enter a case until one full week had passed (unless
there was evidence that the victim had been transported
across state lines prior to that time frame or that some
other federal offense had been committed). Since the time the
book was originally published, the time frame for FBI entry
has been changed to 24 hours, and I believe the procedure now
is to ASSUME that some federal law has been violated in a
kidnapping case, bring the Bureau in immediately, and worry
about which federal statutes gave them an excuse to intervene
later . Obviously the Bureau is able to bring massive amounts
of manpower, expertise, and technical assets often beyond the
capability of local law enforcement, but McBain wanted to
concentrate on his own series cops, for obvious reasons, and
contrived to keep the FBI out of the case in his book, which
lowered the available police manpower quite a bit.
In what was probably the most famous kidnapping case in the
US prior to the Lindbergh case, the kidnapping and murder of
Marian Parker by a criminal who styled himself "The Fox,"
virtually the entire LAPD was involved in one way or another
on the case. Massive road blocks and door-to-door searches
were part of the investigation. Michael Newton's STOLEN AWAY
is a non-fiction account of the case. An early DRAGNET radio
episode, "The Big Overtime," fictionalized it. So in certain
circumstances, substantial amounts of police manpower can and
will be brought to bear on a single case, particularly if
it's high profile. As I said at the beginning, it all
depends.
JIM DOHERTY
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