When I was at University I attended a talk from someone working for the North Yorkshire police's imaging unit. It sounded like a very interesting job, which ranged from crime scene photography, surveillance and promo work. This department was one of the largest and best in the country, and so regularly performed work for the other police departments, who presumably had their own photography capability but not to such a high level.

The forensic side mainly involved creating 360 degree panoramas of crime scenes so that officers could refer to those whilst investigating minimising the actual crime scene visits and disturbance. He didn't mention the IR & UV side of the forensics so I assume these were handled by a different department.

Surveillance was another aspect of the job. I guess it takes a certain mindset as it seemed to mostly consist of sitting in a van with a 1700mm lens (yes really!) here the goal was to be able to recognise people, not to produce high quality images. I was most surprised to find that the same photographers were producing promotional images & portraits for the press and internal use. This is much more similar to the sort of photography I do, but I would certainly enjoy the variety.

He saw the job advertised in the British Journal of Photography. I didn't offer any other tips to finding this sort of job, but I would expect I'd imagine qualifications in science to be a requirement. This would certainly be an easier avenue to pursue coming from a IT background compared to journalistic photography, which has a more established journalism school career progression. To answer your other question, yes you can study photography in journalism schools, at least in the UK. Here is a highly recommended course that I know people have done and gone on to careers photojournalism:

http://www.sheffcol.ac.uk/index.cfm?ParentID=b4ec0424-ef60-4b23-a840-b9fc6ec0300e