"COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"

If you’re a reader of crime fiction or a fan of crime shows on TV you’ve probably wondered how much of the police procedure you see depicted is accurate. In books? It’s probably not bad. On TV? Maybe not so much.

Sooner or later most writers, even if they’re in science fiction, will probably feature a crime scenario and the ensuing police investigation, and I think writers have an obligation to try to get the details right. Fortunately there are now lots of resources to help, including websites and books especially produced for writers. But details can vary a lot from place to place, so why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth (a police horse, of course)? You might be surprised to find that your local police service is very willing to help you get your facts straight. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about policing in a medium-sized city in Ontario, Canada.

-         police services in Ontario are networked and use PowerCase software to collect case information. One of the benefits is that similarities to a case in another jurisdiction can be readily found and flagged.

-         Any major case passed to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) is handled by a Major Case Management Team (MCMT) which uses the Major Case Management Triangle, consisting of a Team Commander, a Primary Investigator, and a File Coordinator. The titles sometimes change, and the triangle can be only two people instead of three, but the three roles must be covered.

-         In my city, investigators routinely handle 20 cases at a time. In some jurisdictions it can be twice that many!

-         Some police services have Scenes Of Crime Officers known as SOCO’s who take all the photographs and collect all of the physical evidence at a crime scene. In other places, it is an officer of the Forensics Identification Unit who does this. In every instance they’re very strict about who gets access to a crime scene. A local FIU might process fingerprints on their own, but chemical or other physical evidence is sent to a specialized lab. In Ontario it would be either the Centre for Forensic Science in Toronto or the Northern Regional Forensic Laboratory in Sault Ste. Marie. Your area will have similar places.

Just from this sampling, it’s easy to see how a writer could go wrong and damage the credibility of their story.

So don’t “surrender” to your lack of knowledge. Get the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.



HOW DOES YOUR BRAIN WORK?

Fantasy writers can make up all the details of their fictional world. Authors who write about real life can observe what goes on around them. For the rest of us, there’s research. The research I’m doing for the novel I’ve just begun to write (my fourth) is about consciousness, and how the brain works. And it’s enough to make my brain stop working.

Considering we’ve all got a brain (yes, even that @#$*&X driver in front of you), and we think we know how we think, there’s been an awful lot of ink spilled in attempts to explain it. The French philosopher Descartes is famous for saying, “I think, therefore I am.” And one of his main beliefs about how we think has become deeply ingrained in our collective knowledge, because it fits what we intuitively believe about the process of our thoughts. It seems evident that, for every bit of information taken in by our senses, there’s a specific moment when we become conscious of that information, and the details surrounding it (“Oh, look, there’s a very solid baseball coming straight at my face at high speed!”) So each moment of awareness is kind of like an image projected onto a screen in our heads (what some philosophers call the Cartesian theatre). But that forces the question: who’s looking at the screen? It presupposes there’s an inner mind, a deeper you or me who sees the projections on the screen and then does something about them—presumably a center spot of the brain where consciousness happens and decisions are made.

Neuroscientists have never found such a place. Philosophers now discredit the idea of the Cartesian theatre and will fill a book with thought exercises to show you why it’s wrong (a book so thick it qualifies as physical exercise just to lift it). Prevailing theories suggest that consciousness is more like a stream of activity with information coming in constantly, being processed, gaining priority and triggering action, or failing to achieve priority and being discarded. If you think it’s hard to wrap your head around a concept like that, imagine trying to absorb and retain it, along with dozens of other facts about neuroanatomy, brain-scanning technology, cognitive evolution, and more, while you try to write a good old-fashioned yarn about average people and the trouble they get into.

I guess the real question is: was I conscious when I decided to make a living this way?