Book of Police Procedure and Investigation

Almost everything you think you know about police work, you learned from television, and almost all of it is wrong. That is the premise of the Book of Police Procedure and Investigation by Lee Lofland, and it makes the book one of the most valuable references a crime writer can own, because it corrects the specific, confident errors that TV has planted in every writer’s head. Among the crime-writer’s reference shelf, this is the standout, and it earns that standing.

Lofland is a veteran police investigator turned writer, and the book carries the authority of someone who did the job for years and then learned to explain it to authors. That combination, real experience plus a teacher’s clarity, is exactly what the subject needs.

Correcting what television taught you

The book’s great value is that it directly targets the myths fiction repeats endlessly. How investigations actually proceed, what police can and cannot legally do, how evidence is really collected and processed, how arrests, interrogations, and crime scenes actually work, all corrected against the dramatic shortcuts that film and television have made writers believe are true. Because so much fictional police work is copied from other fiction rather than from reality, errors compound, and Lofland breaks the cycle by going to the source. For a writer whose sense of police procedure comes secondhand from crime drama, this is the necessary corrective.

The insider authority

What separates this from the older references on the same shelf is that Lofland writes from direct experience and writes for novelists specifically. He knows not just the procedure but the texture, how officers actually talk, what the work feels like, the details a writer needs to make a police character ring true rather than reading like a TV cop. He also runs a well-known resource connecting writers with law-enforcement expertise, so the book reflects an ongoing engagement with exactly the questions crime writers ask. That practical, writer-facing authority is the book’s defining strength.

The honest caveats

The caveats are real but milder than for its shelfmates. Published in 2007, it is more current than the early-1990s references around it, though policing, technology, and law have still moved since, so a careful writer verifies specifics, especially anything touching technology or recent legal change. Procedure also varies by jurisdiction, and a book describing general American practice cannot capture the local specifics of every department, so a writer setting a story in a particular place still needs local detail. And it is a procedural reference, not a craft guide, so it grounds the police side without teaching storytelling.

Verdict

It is the best of the crime-writer’s procedural references, valuable precisely because it corrects the confident misinformation that television has installed in every writer’s mind, written by someone who did the work and knows how to teach it. For any writer whose story involves police, investigation, or the criminal justice system, it is close to essential, the first place to fix the errors you do not know you are making. It loses only a little for the inevitable drift since 2007 and for jurisdictional variation. A genuinely excellent, practical reference and the standout of its category.

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