Deficient Police Investigations,
From the First Call to the Closed File

• Professor Gregory Gilbertson (Ret.): thirty-eight years across policing, the Army, the classroom, and investigative casework. Independent consultants are retained case-by-case where the record calls for a second discipline.
• Retained in more than 220 civil rights and criminal cases across 42 states and the District of Columbia; expert practice since 2014.
• Retained by plaintiff’s counsel and by the defense alike, in civil and criminal matters.
• Fees are published: a $9,000 flat fee covering discovery review and the written expert report; the full schedule is on For Retaining Counsel.
• Attorney and law-firm inquiries only; conflicts are checked before any substantive discussion. (239) 571-1840.

Reviews serve both civil matters and criminal defense, through post-conviction.

A homicide, shooting or serious-felony investigation is worked in stages: the response and the scene, the canvass and the witnesses, the identification of a suspect, the interviews, the collection and submission of evidence, and the case file with the supervisory review that closes it. The stages overlap in time, but the dependency runs forward: each stage works from what the earlier ones preserved. An identification draws on the descriptions the canvass and the first witness contacts produced, the interviews can reach only the witnesses someone found, and a closure review can approve only what the file contains.

That dependency is why a deficient investigation is read in sequence rather than as a list of separate errors. A list counts departures; a sequence shows which of them reached the work that followed. An unsecured scene, a canvass that never happened or a first theory adopted before the evidence was in is a departure at one stage, and it can limit every later stage that depended on the one where it happened.

As a police investigation expert witness, Professor Gilbertson follows the file in the order the work was done and asks, at each stage, what the later stages needed from it and whether they had it. Each departure is measured against the agency's own policy and generally accepted police practices, on the totality of the facts and circumstances as the investigators knew them then, without hindsight. The Library holds the standards for individual stages, beginning with crime scene documentation standards for the scene. What the analysis adds is the path a departure takes out of its own stage and into the stages that relied on it.

An early gap need not reach every later step, and the analysis does not assume that it does. A later canvass, for example, can find the witness the first one missed. Where the file shows a later step supplying what the gap left out of the record, the gap is reported as recovered, with the recovering step named. The gap itself is still reported beside the recovery, since it remains a departure at its own stage, and the weight of anything recovered late is for the finder of fact.

A scene with no access log may still have a complete collection record for every item; the collection is then reported as done anyway, a status that speaks only to that record, and the missing log stays a gap of its own. For each gap, the report names the stage where it opened and the later steps it touched, and gives each step a status: made impossible, done without the record it depended on, done anyway, or recovered.

Every status turns on order, so each entry is placed on the record chronology: when the gap opened, when the later step happened, and which source dates each. A recovery has to come after the gap it answers, and a step reported as done anyway has to appear in the record rather than be assumed.

When the early gap is a theory adopted too soon, how that shows in the file is set out under tunnel vision, and the analysis follows the theory's reach into each stage after it. The questions a claim of self-defense adds to an investigation are taken up in that practice area.

Case accounts as published by retaining counsel. Outcomes depend on their facts; no result is promised for any other matter.