A Case for a Case Book
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X4902200411 |
| Published date | 01 October 1949 |
| Date | 01 October 1949 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
A Case for a Case Book
" Long experience made him sage."
JOHN
GAY:
The Shepherd and the Philosopher.
CONT ROVE RSY, ever and anon, breaks
out
between
the"
promote
'em
young"
school of thought and the more staid members of
the Police Service whose views are tempered with the acids of passing
years.
"Experience"
is the shuttlecock which is hurled swiftly
between the opposing sides.
"Experience,"
says one, " is
the
name
given to the slavish following of precedents."
"Experience,"
says the
other, " is the greater part of efficiency."
Controversy aside, no intelligent person really despises experi-
ence; everyone desires it and, in the Police Service, those who have
it not, or only in small measure, are apt to make rather pathetic claims
to it in between bouts of derision.
Now an obvious factor about police experience is that we cannot
all enjoy the same experiences, or even similar ones. Take, for example,
the common offence of housebreaking.
Not
all police officers will
have seen a break committed by the strip of celluloid method, or the
weighted stick clipped to the handle of a spring-lock trick. But nearly
all officers will have heard of
them-in
the course of training, by read-
ing police publications, or merely by talking'
shop'
with other officers.
This
kind of sharing of experience is so simple and elementary
that it will
not
have occurred to everyone
just
what a vast amount of
daily police experience is lost through inadequate means of sharing.
Courses, colleges, conferences, and the like, only dip into the fringe
of
th~
vast pool of practical knowledge formed by accumulated police
expenence.
Additional means of sharing experiences are thus to be ardently
sought, and the more or less permanent method of reducing experience
to the written word is already one of the most popular, and one of the
most efficient. No originality is therefore claimed for
the'
Case
Book'
idea which is here propounded.
It
is undoubtedly ahandy way of
experience-Sharing and is probably paralleled in many Forces under
the guise of a Force magazine, bulletin or what have you.
In the writer's own Force
the'
Case Book' sets
out
to place on
record in a readable
but
necessarily brief form some of the more
interesting cases which occur within the Force itself. Only occasionally
does it go outside to pick up an important legal decision or a specially
important point of procedure.
Published quarterly, each issue deals with the cases occurring in
the immediately preceding quarter.
The
Force is not a large one
3°3
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