‘I don't find it sexy at all’: criminal investigators' views of media glamorization of police ‘dirty work’

Abstract

Public fascination with criminal detection has led to a plethora of images of investigational work in the media and to a radical reworking of public perceptions of the nature of the police investigator's role and of the occupation's dirty work elements. In this paper, we draw upon in-depth interviews with 31 Canadian police investigators to explore how they perceive the physically dirty elements of their job and their views related to the public treatment of those same elements as glamorous and exciting in the mass media. The investigators interviewed described how the daily realities of their work differ from the highly sanitised images presented in the media, although several noted that these portrayals led them to a career in policing. However, these investigators also explained that soon after entering the field they realised there is nothing glamorous or sexy about criminal investigation. Through a discussion of the contrasts between media portrayals of the physically dirty aspects of their jobs and police investigators' occupational realities, what is revealed is a far more complex portrait of police investigational work and what it is about this work that investigators themselves find to be exciting, satisfying and challenging.