Who Worked Together?

Within any criminal investigation it is important that all of the members of the investigation team work together, this is so that the investigation is carried out effectively and efficiently, when the members of an investigation team work together it is much more likely that a secure audit trail will be established and maintained, this is because all of the members will be cooperating in ultimately ensuring that evidence is kept secure and that the crime is solved and the correct individual convicted for what they did.

Although it has been previously discussed that many of the individual members of the investigation team in the OJ Simpson investigation made mistakes that ultimately led to the acquittal of Simpson, the team also did work together during parts of the investigation. An example of this can be seen when the detectives and scenes of crime officers worked together. As the scenes of crime officers did not arrive at the crime scene until hours after the crime had originally been discovered the detectives from the LAPD homicide division had already taken over the case. These detectives performed walk-throughs of the crime scene and also of Simpson’s property, the detectives then communicated with the scenes of crime officers as to what pieces of evidence they felt were important and therefore needed to be collected. The detectives also supervised the scenes of crime officers whilst they were collecting evidence. If the mistakes that have been previously pointed out, hadn’t occurred the team work performed between these team members could have been effective in ensuring that a conviction was secured, this would be because the scenes of crime officers would have collected relevant and important evidence as identified as the detectives– much of which did actually point to Simpson being the perpetrator. However the teamwork was undermined by the large amounts of mistakes made by almost all of the members of the investigation.