Organizing the Organizational Memory

This chapter concerns ‘organizing the organizational memory’, that is, the fundamental processes, practices, and procedures required to enable cold case reviews to take place. The advances in DNA profiling techniques and technologies have created a growth of opportunities for reviewing cold cases, and in this chapter it will become clear how this investigative potential has created new problems requiring the development of a system of working before a review can take place, suggesting the need to look forward and back in the review process. What emerges is a process of ‘back engineering’ and forward planning, a collection of routine activities centred on finding opportunities to identify and connect suspects to the unsolved crimes revealing the realities of such work, which is often mundane, far from the gloss and glamour depicted by media representations. The challenges to achieving a successful detection are also laid out.