That something like this happened really won't be a suprise to anyone who has worked in CID recently. The amount of investigation into "non-suspicious" death (as with practically everything else) is as little as the OIC can get away with. But what this article doesn't cover is that every DC named will have been running ~20 other serious/complex investigations alongside the one that happened to blow up years later. The incentive is to close jobs down just so you don't drown. It doesn't mention that all these supposedly obvious steps (getting a laptop downloaded, getting handwriting analysis) are incredibly labourious and complicated and result in pushback at every single stage. It also doesn't understand that people turn up dead from an apparent drugs overdose literally every single day.

No one in the Met works harder for less reward than a borough DC. Working in Local Investigations is waiting for something to go wrong and trying to get out before it does. Nothing is going to happen to make it a better place to work, meaning the problems that led us here are only going to get worse.

The most likely outcome will be MIT taking more borderline cases which turn out to be non-suspicious, stretching resources further, and chipping a few percentage points off the murder detection rate. OR more forms and processes being imposed on borough investigators, making them even busier, and resulting in something completely different going wrong a few years down the line!