When I was a security guard working my way through graduate school, I found that a significant number of the guys I was working with had literacy problems. It wasn’t just a problem of not being able to write a cogent report of an incident they’d witnessed or been involved in; some were just functionally illiterate. But I never imagined that I would encounter this same phenomena amongst private investigators, when as a fluke, I wound up as one myself.
It’s not like I’m trying to hold people to my own personal standards of scholarship. I had completed 22 units with a 4.0 GPA (grade point average, i.e., straight A’s) before I dropped out of graduate school. But since I’ve been in the profession for thirty (30) years, I have found that some private investigators and some police officers are in fact functionally illiterate. I’m emphasizing some because some people didn’t understand the grammatical construction of a letter I wrote to the Chair of the Assembly Business & Professions Committee in support of SB 202 and there was nothing difficult about the plain language of the letter.
Several investigators have criticized me for the following language that is quoted in the letter:
And whereas, since 80% of all private investigators are former law enforcement officers who have little or no training regarding family law and civil practice procedures, laws, ethics and regulations, it is imperative that such additional training be required to insure consumers are better served and the public protected;
If the people reading the letter actually understood what they were reading, first off, they would have realized that this was a quote from a resolution passed by the State Convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Instead of saying that in their emails and postings, and letters denouncing the statement, they attributed the statement directly to me. The second problem with their criticism is that they did not understand the grammatical effect of the use of the conjunctive word “and” between “family law and civil practice procedures,” and the subsequent use of commas as additional conjunctives. Those conjunctives relate the words “laws, ethics, and regulations” back to “family law and civil practice.”
At no time did that resolution ever intend to mean, and no reasonable person would interpret it to mean that law enforcement officers don’t get training in “law, ethics, and regulations.” The plain fact is, that most law enforcement officers don’t get training in the non-law enforcement related court procedures and civil process rules relating to issues like orders to show cause and motions in family law or the nuances of civil cases having nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. Granted, if somebody worked in the civil division of a Sheriff’s office, something most peace officers will never do, they would certainly know the nuances of process service very well, but that doesn’t make them experts at the rules of evidence for civil and family law cases, which are very different from those of the criminal courts.
Getting back to literacy though I have found that it is entirely possible to be functionally illiterate and to be either a sworn peace officer or a private investigator. Two cases on point:
- While investigating a former Compton Police Detective, who defense lawyers had always noted seemed to have brilliantly written reports, I came across his divorce case. Somebody must have been ghost - writing his reports for criminal court, because he’d drafted his own declaration for his divorce case. There was not one single complete sentence and not one properly constructed paragraph in the entire declaration. Forget the mis-spellings. It was fundamentally incomprehensible. Additionally, he served the divorce summons and petition on his sister-in-law, not his wife and he did it personally. He served it at an address which he acknowledged his wife didn’t live at and had the sister-in-law sign the proof of service where the process server was supposed to sign and he signed on the line designated for a peace officer to sign if a paper was being served by a sheriff or marshal.
- Recently, Lita Abella and I took over a case that had previously seen several other investigators before us. When we saw the “report” done by one of the former investigators, a former federal agent, we were appalled. I won’t even go into the details, but unfortunately, I’ve seen this kind of deficiency one too many times in my own profession and it’s embarrassing.
So, the people who’ve criticized that quote from the LULAC resolution think that private investigators don’t need Mandatory Continuing Education. Well, maybe some don’t. But some clearly do. Those that do need it can do great harm to the public by not getting up to par. It’s almost impossible to write a law that creates the perfect law for every single individual it will affect, but that’s the nature of the legislative process. You try to get the best remedy for the most people.
So, if the opponents of MCE can think up a better way to deal with those within our profession who are functionally illiterate and somehow wound up with a private investigator license, I’d like to hear your solution. In the meantime, I’d like to require them to get MCE and to do that, we all have to get MCE to improve our skills and keep up with the constantly changing legal and technological environment that we practice in.
By the way, you can find the full letter from the Same Page Coalition at:
http://www.janbtucker.com/IdeaOpinions.html