Years ago Johnny Carson had a P.I. as a guest because P.I. shows on TV were really popular at the time. He had two answers to questions that stuck out to me, and I’m wondering if you would agree or not with them.
He thought that The Rockford Files was the most realistic detective show on TV at the time.
When asked about his license, he said the only thing a P.I. license allowed him to do that the general public couldn’t was loiter. Otherwise, he said it didn’t give him any special access or privileges.
Can’t comment on the first because I’ve never actually watched the show, unfortunately.
As to the second, I think this is essentially true. California’s Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, the controlling body, says this, among other things: “A Private Investigator has no law enforcement authority even if he/she has been hired by law enforcement to perform an investigation. A Private Investigator is an ordinary citizen and can only make citizen’s arrests.”
We discussed at one time me becoming licensed, which you can do by having a certain number of hours of experience under a licensed investigator and passing a test. But ultimately, we decided that there wasn’t much I could do for the firm that I wasn’t already doing without a license, and that it gave them some flexibility in billing clients a lower hourly rate for my services since I wasn’t a “full-fleged” investigator.
I don’t think there’s any legal way for a PI to do this other than the ways we’d occasionally get lucky via dumpster diving. My wife can tell you how paranoid I can be about shredding mail. People throw away a lot of useful information.
There are people in my (distant) past that I’ve lost touch with, and I’m curious how their lives turned out. I’m not really interested in re-connecting with them, though. How would you go about finding out about them? And how much would your office charge for something like this?
A different question: thinking of the show “Leverage”, did you ever get contracted to find embarrassing or negative information about someone? Would your PI office do this, or would there be ethical questions your PI raised?
We didn’t really do the type of cases related to individuals that you’re asking about in your examples. Most of our clients were corporate or government entities. Knowing my boss at the time, he would have had some real moral qualms with being asked to find “dirt” on someone for that reason. He considered it his job to report everything he found, good and bad, for any investigation we did. It was up to the lawyers to put whatever spin on that info they wanted to.
I think that the hourly rates for the people working at the firm ranged from $80/hr to a little over $300/hr depending on the investigator, but it has been 10 years since I was in the job, so I don’t recall for sure. These days, the research would probably be vastly different than it was then, given that so much information about people is on the internet. Even in my current job, I’m sometimes asked to find out what I can about potential witnesses, and “unprotected” Facebook pages can provide a wealth of information. That wasn’t much of an option in my long-ago youth.
To what level of scrutiny. Your average PI, Police, FBI, IRS. How are you employed? The TV show “In plain sight” leans heavily on the concept of having to reinvent yourself to a certain degree.
I for example am damn near impossible to find at home. I have moved 4 times in 6 years, all via verbal arrangements for cash rent. My mailing address is my business, and I am primarily onsite with customers. You could stake out the business or issue a BoL for me and my vehicle and let local law enforcement snag me on the street. A thorough check of family residences would find me right now, but I have no official presence here on paper or any database beyond I lived here 22 years ago.