Location from The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
Chicago Police Department's Special Investigations division — the underfunded, understaffed unit that handles the cases too weird for regular cops, staffed by officers nobody else wants.
Special Investigations is where the Chicago Police Department puts the cases it doesn't want to explain. Vampire attacks get filed as 'animal mauling.' Troll encounters become 'assault by unknown perpetrator.' Spontaneous combustion from a wizard duel gets logged as 'electrical fire, cause undetermined.' SI handles all of it with a budget that would embarrass a suburban precinct and a staff rotation that ensures nobody stays long enough to start believing what they're seeing. The SI offices are in a corner of the CPD headquarters building — cramped, poorly maintained, and decorated with the particular institutional neglect reserved for departments that embarrass the brass. The desks are secondhand. The filing cabinets are overflowing. The coffee is terrible. Assignment to SI is generally understood as a career punishment — you get sent there because you made someone angry, because you saw something you couldn't explain and made the mistake of writing it up honestly, or because you're Karrin Murphy. Murphy ran SI for years with a combination of tactical brilliance, personal courage, and a stubborn refusal to pretend the supernatural didn't exist. She turned a dumping ground for career rejects into an effective, if perpetually under-resourced, unit that actually solved weird cases. Harry Dresden is SI's unofficial consultant — listed in their files as a 'civilian advisor' because nobody wants to write 'wizard' on a government form. After Murphy's departure, SI continues under new leadership, still underfunded, still under-believed, still the first line of defense for a city that doesn't know it needs one.
Standard municipal police building — fluorescent lights, institutional furniture, coffee that could dissolve a spoon. Special Investigations is in the basement, understaffed and under-believed. The case files in SI would give a normal cop nightmares.
Also known as: SI, Special Investigations, CPD, Chicago PD headquarters