What kind of hours would a homicide detective realistically work?

Question

I'm trying to make a murder mystery I wrote more realistic. It centers on a homicide detective. Most of it is about the investigation, but there is also a side story going on in her personal life. I have read lots of crime nonfiction, but I've never come across anything indicating what kind of time off a detective would have.

Obviously it's not a 9 to 5 job. When you have a hot lead, you follow it up then instead of punching the time clock, heading home, and picking things up the next day. But how much of a life outside of work should my fictional detective have? It's a high profile murder. Would I be farfetched if I had her work all week on the case and part of Saturday, but taking Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday off? I know that homicide detectives usually have a caseload of more than one case, so there must be some kind of a schedule that allows them to have down time.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Its a life of odd hours, never being able to plan for holidays or family events because you never know if you will be there.

When the pager sounds, you are on the run. Sometimes you go for a day, sometimes for two or three. You sleep when you can, where you can. If you are lucky, you work for a big police agency that has a mobile command post and you can catch some ZZZ's in there when time permits.

Some weeks are slow, some are non stop. You can never guess how many hours you will work in a week. Sometimes 40, sometimes 100. This is one of those jobs where you gotta love the job or you won't cut it!

Answer 2

Very early in my LE career, I was in the army and worked for Criminal Investigations Division (CID). Most of the work my partner and I did were drug cases, but we did do several other types of investigatons, including violent crimes. What I discovered is the investigative process is pretty much the same. Process the scene, collect what evidence you can, interview your witnesses, arrest your suspect, write your report. This is what my process was for a rape investigation:
1. got the call, went to the scene, interviewed the victim who did not know her attacker. Had her transported to the hospital and collected the rape kit. My partner began interviewing neighbors, hoping someone saw something. He also oversaw the collection of other evidence at the scene. This took about 4 hours.
2. Back at the office. Wrote a preliminary report, Put together my evidence log. Set up my case folder. Took evidence to the Evidence room. Partner returned to office, he had found someone who saw a strange vehicle and did give a description of it. Called hospital, taked to victim, she recognized vehicle as belonging to a friend of a girl friend, but did not know name. Got name of girl friend. Tried to call her but she was out of town until the next day. Added this information to my case folder. This took about three hours.
3. That was all we could do with this case for the day. My partner and I reviewed our other open cases and then went home for the evening.
4. The following day I managed to contact the girl friend she gave me the name of the guy who owned the vehicle. Went to his house, no one home. Neighbor gave us work address, went there, found truck, took photo of truck, went back to orginal witness who identified the truck.
5. Back to office, more info into the case folder. A witness from another case called and went went to interview him. This took about 2 hours.
6. Lab called us, scrapings from victims fingernails (she sratched her attacker) had enough blood to identify type (this occured before DNA).
7. Contacted boss of suspect who let us review employee records, which contained blood type, which matched suspect. Also told us that suspect was not at work the day of the attack.
8. Suspect now at home. We go there to interview him. Noticed he had scratch marks on neck. Accused him of the rape, he denied it, pointed out we had blood from him on victim, he then states sex was consenual. We arrest suspect.

This case took two days. We did not work any overtime on this. Most cases aren't quite this easy. There is only so much you can do on an investigation. Evidence that has to be processed by a lab can take weeks to get back to you. Until that evidence comes back to give you a lead, your investigation stalls. It's not like on TV where one lead rapidly follows another. I once spent almost a month on an investigative lead that led nowhere. There are some investigations where everything starts to come together rapidly and you will try to follow up everything while you can, despite the time involved. Others just grind on and you work them for awhile and put them away to come back the next day.
Hope this helps.