Thank you Pegasus. It is very interesting. A very down to earth lady.
An excellent article indeed.
Highly informative and gives an insight into the organisation and teamwork which goes on in the incident rooms of SY ... with very clear lines and chains of command and responsibility.
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When cases break, Stewart is very much the brains of the operation; it's a fallacy that detectives spend their days charging around revisiting crime scenes or examining witnesses, as we might assume.
"You couldn't do it all," she says.
In most incident rooms, the workload is spread among about 18 detectives, most of whom have been trained specifically for different roles.
"I'm much more the co-ordinator," she continues.
"I allocate things: the family liaison officer; someone to trawl through the CCTV. We'd have a house-to-house co-ordinator. I probably wouldn't meet the witness unless there was some problem - if we could give her any assistance with protection and that kind of thing…
Then you've got one case officer who will take the case to court eventually, an exhibits officer, the telephones officer and a float."
The biggest surprise is how rarely she even interviews the suspects. "We have specialist interviewers, so they would interview," she explains.
So those psychologically charged detective/murderer interview showdowns we enjoy so much on screen? Pure fiction.
Stewart describes her most valuable skill as "good leadership. Being here, being open to talk to everyone, knowing the team, who they are, what their strengths are. I think the best managers are good people persons," she says.
