– As a result of advances in DNA and other forensic technologies, police agencies are showing increased interest in cold-case investigations, with larger departments dedicating staff to conducting these investigations or forming cold-case squads. The purpose of this paper is to provide information on how police agencies organize and conduct cold-case investigations.
– To assess the current practices used in cold-case investigations, an exploratory survey was sent to a stratified random sample of police agencies across the US survey findings are based on 1,051 returns.
– Results include the following. Most agencies do little cold-case work, with only 20 percent having a protocol for initiating cold-case investigations, 10 percent having dedicated cold-case investigators, and 7 percent having a formal cold-case unit. Cold-case funding is tenuous: 20 percent of cold-case work is funded through line items in the budget, with most funded by grants or supplemental funds. Success rates for cold-case investigations are low: about one in five cases are cleared. Agency factors associated with higher clearance rates included level of funding and access to investigative databases.
– As new forensic tools are developed, cold-case investigations will become an increasingly prominent activity of criminal investigation units. The survey reported on in this paper gives the first glimpse of how agencies are handling these cases.
– To the knowledge, there are no other empirical studies on how agencies structure and conduct cold-case investigations.
