4.4 Police and Investigation of Crime

Investigation is the police's legal-technical face: from the First Information Report (and the complaint's cognizance rules) to charge-sheet — the Criminal Procedure Code 2074's stages (cross-reference Procedural Law-II, LAW5403, this semester, for the full procedure): scene attendance and seizure, witness examination, the suspect's questioning within the Art 20safeguards (counsel's access, no compulsion — the self-incrimination bar), medical and forensic evidence (the National Forensic Science Laboratory's role in the era of DNA and digital trails), the case diary, and the prosecutor's pairing (the police–prosecutor interface for the trial's evidence). The quality questions: investigation's training deficit, the confession-primacy habit (the torture temptation that Art 22 prohibits and criminalises), chain-of-custody failures, and the dark figure (many crimes never reported or recorded). The digital turn: e-evidence, platform records and the ETA 2063's electronic-document face — the investigator's new literacy.