I understand why it might have started out this way when police forces were first becoming established, but why does it continue to be this way?
These seem like entirely different skill sets, and surely it’s easier to teach them basic police skills as part of their training rather than having them stay as beat cops for several years first.
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Patrol cops and detectives actually have a huge skill overlap. In the US agencies hire patrol officers or beat cops and they prove themselves as worthy of being detectives by performing well and demonstrating effort to solve cases.
This is because there are essential things you need to know about police work and successful prosecution to be a Detective. Being a cop also forces you to interact with a huge amount of people from different walks of life and you see them in every conceivable state of emotion. That means that when it comes time to choose the new detective, if you pull from cops with sufficient patrol experience then you have a pool of applicants that already know how to interview and interrogate people, are sufficiently hardened to traumatic experiences (dead children, violently murdered bodies, rape victims and other tragedies), aren’t naive, and have proven their ability as investigators and hopefully as “people persons.”
There is basically not a better way to ensure you will have a qualified detective (as long as the process is free from favoritism or other corruption), because many applicants may interview well, may be academically smart, and might even have good training but end up falling short in some way.
Not to mention experienced cops get used to being in court, and detectives testify in court quite a lot. You can’t be a good detective if you fall apart on the stand. Experience testifying in court is an essential part of your qualification, but I rarely hear it spoken about. The general stress inoculation of being a road cop may also help with this, but not necessarily.
If you want to be a detective without being a cop, you can get licensed as a private investigator. I’ll warn you though that the Pinkertons make you start out as a security officer of some kind and probably want experience and demonstrated competency before they’ll hire you as a private investigator– other firms are probably the same. Private investigators in business for themselves tend to not make very much money unless they’re really, really good at some niche (which comes with time) and I think you may find the things they investigate are often… underwhelming. Infidelity, insurance scams, and unlicensed broadcasts of boxing matches and things are their bread and butter.
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