Police procedural

The police procedural is a sub-genre of the mystery story which tries to demonstrate accurately the activities of a police force as they investigate crimes.

Related Topics:
Mystery story - Police - Crime

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In a typical police procedural, "frequently the crime itself is secondary to the details of the crime and the techniques employed by the police to solve the crime."http://www.sfu.ca/english/Gillies/Engl383/police.htm It is not uncommon for a perpetrator's identity to be known from the outset in a procedural.

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It can be difficult to distinguish between a police procedural and other forms of mystery or crime fiction (especially detective novels), and many works blur conventional boundries between genres. The principal distinction is that the police procedural details the activities of an entire squad or group of police officers, whereas a detective novel concentrates on the activities of one private investigator or police officer whose colleagues are, by and large, offstage. Another frequent distinction is that the police procedural attempts to depict the work of police officers in solving multiple crimes simultaneously, whereas the detective novel concentrates on one crime.

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In a police procedural, the principal crimes are generally solved by the story's end, although minor crimes may remain unsolved. One nearly-universal distinction is that the procedural shows us the personal lives of the investigative team, whereas the detective novel typically does not.

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