PRIVATE INVESTIGATION INDUSTRY NEWS
IN THIS ISSUE:
» Strike Guidance for Private Investigators
» Health Reform Likely to Add Costs
» Professor Kills 3, Injures 3 in Bizarre Retaliation
» Private Investigation: Interviewing
» Award Made for Faulty Investigation
» Private Investigation: Note Taking
» Inaccurate Criminal Information
Strike Guidance for Private Investigators
In a labor dispute, the overriding consideration is to maintain order by preventing injury and property damage. This is accomplished through the proper deployment of available resources and ability to rapidly respond. In a strike situation, private investigators may be called upon to supplement the local police and security staff and may be asked to perform extraordinary duties such as involvement in personal conflicts, picket line disturbances, and violent confrontations with employees or others.
Protection is best achieved by taking a neutral position during labor disputes. Actions taken during a strike can result in a civil suit for damages. With proper documentation of actions resulting in damages or injury, a union can be held liable for the actions of its members. Conversely, improper actions by a company, including private investigators, could result in damages payable to unions and their members.
While the client has the final authority in making decisions, it is not uncommon for them to be absent from the facility to participate in collective bargaining or strategy meetings. Problems faced during a strike are not normal, and normal control may not be adequate.
Relationships between local police and private investigators during a strike are extremely important. Jurisdictions must be established well in advance. The private investigator must have a full understanding of response capabilities and an understanding of attitudes and policies toward citizen arrests and prosecution. It is important to note that relations with police and private investigators can be damaged by a management team that expects immediate reaction, including apprehension, arrest and removal of persons committing criminal acts, but later hesitates or refuses to process formal criminal complaints.
The police interest and that of private investigators is not in the merits of the labor dispute, but in preserving peace and preventing violence.
Health Reform Likely to Add Costs
Implications of the Health Reform Act will suggest an increase operating costs of most security guard companies. The industry, for the most part has resisted paying healthcare benefits. The rationale is that many companies believe that additional costs for healthcare coverage would lead to reductions in hours due to higher costs to absorb the coverage.
All security guard firms, and other security-related firms, will most likely be forced to fully cover the health benefits of their employees. Although a few companies provided coverage before the Health Reform Act became law, the truth is that the majority of security guard companies did not.
The new Act requires coverage of such employees, though some of the costs can be passed through to the worker. Employers will also have the option of opting-out of healthcare coverage, but would pay annual penalties.
The industry has always been under pressure to provide value at the lowest possible cost to the customer. As has always been the case, increased costs will be passed on to the customer. The result could be a loss of consumers. At the same time, the costs of healthcare are going through the roof. The new Act is meant to reduce healthcare costs by increasing efficiency of the healthcare system, driving service costs down, and fighting fraud. We shall see.
Source: Security Letter, 166 East 96th Street, New York, NY 10128, Telephone 212-348-1553.
Professor Kills 3, Injures 3 in Bizarre Retaliation
Violence in the workplace has taken on a new dimension after a professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, killed three colleagues and injured three others. The incident is notable for two reasons.
First, the offender was a woman. In a study of 37 mass homicides in the workplace, studied by Seungmung Lee at Western Illinois University and Robert McCrie, author of Security Letter, only one of the violators was a woman. Mass homicides are defined as three or more fatalities.
Next, the offender was a professional. She had completed graduate work at Harvard and was pursuing a career in teaching and research at Huntsville. Normally, mass murderers do not possess advanced education. The working assumption: higher education allows a person’s perspective to find alternatives to difficult circumstances. The shooter was denied employment tenure by her colleagues. That meant she was stigmatized and would have to start over at another institution. Painfully, academics face this traumatic situation each year. This revengeful killing is unprecedented. The genie is out of the bottle.
The Huntsville professor clearly acted according to a pattern in another factor. She killed her victims with a gun. All of the multiple workplace homicides studied by Lee and McCrie involved a gun. A person who savagely strikes others with a knife or other weapon would be unable to kill more than one or two. The others would scatter or restrain the offender.
The Huntsville professor had an unvetted and suspicious past. She had been a suspect in her brother’s death, and later cleared. Institutions must check backgrounds deeper—even of academics.
Source: Security Letter, 166 East 96th Street, New York, NY 10128, Telephone 212-348-1553.
Private Investigation: Interviewing
An interview is the gathering of information from a person who has knowledge concerning a matter under investigation. The person being interviewed usually gives, in his own manner and words, an account of the incident or provides details concerning another person connected to the incident.
During an investigation, the PI may need to question many types of witnesses such as victims, accusers, complainants, and informants. The choice of questioning technique is based not on the type of witness, but on the attitude and willingness of the witness to provide the information being sought. The PI should expect to encounter difficulty when interviewing a person who resents authority, regards the interview as inconvenient and fears self-involvement.
Although physical evidence often plays a key role in an investigation, it has been consistently true that the most prolific and valuable sources of information are the people involved. The skilled investigator recognizes that human factors strongly influence the success or failure of an interview. Human factors include such variables as fear, reluctance, prejudice, revenge, hate, and love. An investigator who can figure out the variables and adjust the approach accordingly will excel at interviewing.
The complex motivations of people cause questioning to be an art rather than a science. Recognizing the subtle signals sent out by a witness is the first step on the path leading to truth. More important than anything else is an ability to correctly assess what the interviewee expects, what he or she is afraid of, and what is going on inside the interviewee’s head. This is not an easy task and is well founded on a base of knowledge sharpened through training and practice. Ideally, the investigator will know basic psychology and be a keen observer of persons.
In addition to the obstacles mentioned above are the perceptions of witnesses, memory, stress and prejudice. Perception is conditioned by the abilities to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Perception is also affected by the location of the viewer in relation to the incident, the amount of time intervening between occurrence and interview, and the nature of events that occur during the interval between occurrence and interview.
Because memory erodes over time, interviews should be conducted as quickly as practicable. Memory not only fades; it becomes colored, either consciously or unconsciously by what the witness was exposed to after the incident. Remarks made by other witnesses or newspaper accounts may cause an interviewee to fill in the gaps of personal memory with details about which he or she has no direct knowledge. A witness may even form a personal opinion of guilt or innocence and shape testimony accordingly. This possibility is reduced when the interview is conducted soon, that is, before the witness has time to form personal judgments that distort the truth.
A person subjected to stressful, exciting, or injurious events after observing an incident is likely to forget details. To illustrate, assume a pedestrian observes a speeding motorist strike another pedestrian and drive away from the scene. The witness is caught up in a series of actions in which he or she might render first aid and transport the injured victim to the hospital. What the witness experienced in the immediate aftermath may cause a faulty recollection concerning the hit and run vehicle.
It is not unreasonable to expect every witness to be prejudiced to some degree. The strength and targets of prejudice vary among people. You should be alert to prejudice and deal with it when it surfaces. One way to keep information from being distorted by prejudice is to require detailed, specific answers. If allowed to talk in generalities, a prejudiced person will make statements that are partially accurate and partially misleading. By remaining within a narrow line of discussion aimed at a specific issue, the witness will be forced to respond with information free of bias.
Source: http://www.learningshopusa.com
Award Made for Faulty Investigation
Facts: Gregg Levin worked for Canon Business Solutions for 21 years as a field technician who serviced the company’s copy machines. Levin was allowed to keep an inventory of parts in his car and home. The company used an automated database to track the parts. Levin’s ex-wife called the company and said that Levin had been stealing and selling parts and supplies. The company assigned in-house auditors to investigate and hired a private security consultant, Michael Cerame, to assist.
Levin was instructed to report for a meeting at the company offices. When he arrived, Levin was told that the company wanted to retried inventory stored at his home. Levin was forced to ride with the auditors over his objection, and suffered an anxiety attack in the vehicle. Levin told the auditors they could not come into his home. He was told that if they were not allowed in, he would be terminated and criminal charges would be filed. Levin alleged that he was shoved aside by Cerame, and that the auditors searched his home. Levin sued the company, various employees, and Cerame for false imprisonment, invasion of privacy, defamation, wrongful termination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
A jury found the defendants liable for wrongful imprisonment, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Levin was awarded $214,470 in damages. The defendants filed a motion for judgment despite the verdict and the motion for new trial. Both were denied. The defendants appealed.
Decision: The court of appeal affirmed the trial court’s denial of the defendants’ motion and held that there was sufficient evidence of an agency relationship between Cerame and both the company and its subsidiary. Therefore, the defendants were vicariously liable for Levin’s damages. Additionally, the court of appeal found evidence to support direct liability against the company because it ordered the investigation.
Implications: Though there may not be a direct employment relationship between the private security consultant that committed the wrongful acts and the company that requested the investigation, a company may be exposed to liability because the consultant may be viewed as an agent. Authorizing a third party to perform theft investigation forms an agency relationship, which may expose a company to both direct and vicarious liability. Levin v. Canon Business Solutions, Inc. No. B218815, (California).
Source: Security Law Newsletter, published monthly by Stafford Publications, Atlanta, GA. www.straffordpub.com, phone: 800-926-7926 ext. 10 or email: custserv@staffordpub.
Private Investigation: Note Taking
A private investigator takes notes on numerous occasions, for example; talking on the phone, transcribing data from an internet database, receiving a complaint, recording the details of a meeting, remembering an important fact, obtaining information from a defendant, interviewing a person familiar with a case under investigation, and interrogating a suspect. This article discusses note taking during an interrogation.
A skillful interrogator will take notes unobtrusively, i.e., in a manner that does not impede the interrogation such as by causing the suspect to be distracted or fearful. An alternative is note taking by an observer sitting behind or out of sight of the suspect.
If you are the interrogator and have a good memory, you can make abbreviated notes as the interrogation progresses, but the abbreviated notes may have to be expanded upon in the immediate aftermath of the interrogation while your memory is still fresh. A variation of this technique is to prepare ahead of time a list of bullet points, leaving sufficient space for notes to be made below or next to them. The order in which the bullet-point topics are discussed can vary.
Whatever technique you use, be sure that note taking occurs throughout the entire interrogation, not just when the suspect makes a pertinent disclosure or an incriminating remark.
Notes you take during an interrogation are called original notes; notes prepared later are not. The distinction is that original notes can be used on the stand while testifying: notes prepared later cannot. A problem might be created if you take non-original notes to the stand. Upon discovering this, opposing counsel might ask that the original notes be produced. Any discrepancy, no matter how small, between the original notes and later notes can be used by opposing counsel to discredit your testimony.
Inaccurate Criminal Information
Facts: Bahir Smith applied for several positions as a truck driver. A number of the employers who received Smith’s application employed HireRight Solutions to perform a public record search on Smith. Smith had one arrest and conviction on his record for defiant trespass and public drunkenness. Other charges related to the same incident were dropped by the prosecutor. HireRight provided reports to several employers which misreported his single arrest as being three or four separate incidents. Smith was rejected for employment by all companies who received reports from HireRight.
Smith initiated a class action lawsuit against HireRight alleging it violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Smith claimed that HireRight failed to notify him contemporaneously of the criminal content of his report when they conveyed the information to the potential employers, failed to maintain strict procedures to handle the reported information, and failed to ensure that the information contained in their reports was accurate. HireRight filed a motion to dismiss arguing it should not be held liable because Smith and the others in the class action failed to allege that their conduct was unreasonable or willful. HireRight then argued that the information was technically accurate because Smith was convicted or charged with the offenses on the report; however, the offenses were merely over-reported.
Decision: The district court denied HireRight’s motion to dismiss. The district court held that HireRight acted unreasonably when they included multiple listings for Smith’s single criminal offense. The district court held, when a consumer reporting agency furnishes a report that contains matters of public records that may adversely affect consumers seeking employment, the reporting agency must notify the consumer that the report was transmitted, and maintain strict procedures to ensure that the information reported is accurate and current. Because the court found that HireRight failed to comply with the FCRA, their motion to dismiss was denied.
Implications: This case illustrates the importance of carefully handling consumer credit and criminal history information. If a company knowingly or recklessly provides inaccurate, prejudicial, or misleading background information about a consumer to a potential employer, the company may be liable for the harm the erroneous report caused the consumer. U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania May 12, 2010.
Source: Security Law Newsletter, published monthly by Strafford Publications, Atlanta, GA. www.straffordpub.com, phone: 800-926-7926 ext. 10 or email: custserv@straffordpub.com.
For additional Private Investigation industry news articles,
please visit ElDoradoInsurance.com
Return to the ONGUARD E-news homepage