If the Internet age has taught us anything, especially in the last year, it’s that people are not afraid to share their opinions. Whether it be politics, social issues, or politics (see what I did there?), Internet message boards and social media offer platforms where anyone and everyone can make their opinions known.
As a private investigator, opining can be a slippery slope. More often than not, our job is simply to identify and present facts. We leave the judgments regarding guilt, innocence, character, emotion, well-being or state-of-mind to the client.
We are not judges, jurors, psychologists or mind readers.
We are fact finders.
In our line of work, we are often tasked with composing background reports on a variety of people for a variety of reasons. The report may be part of a lawsuit, for an investor, or for a business deal. The first rule of writing these reports is that we NEVER offer our opinion. Our job is to gather information, analyze it, and report the facts in a clear and concise manner that informs our clients and allows them to make informed decisions. The only opinion that matters is the client’s, not ours.
So, while we can tell the client that we identified dozens of photos of what appear to portray drug use with youngish women, calling the person a drug-dealing pimp is not something we would ever do.
Similarly, suggesting that someone is a loving person, “reformed,” or presuming that someone had turned around their life intimates that we are mind readers or psychologists. The truth is, we still get surprised at which facts our clients find relevant to their bottom line and which they find irrelevant.
We were recently provided a portion of a fellow investigator’s report in which the social media section was basically a reflection of how the investigator felt about the person. It contained multiple uses of the word “I” and their personal opinion on the person’s social media presence. The investigator also used descriptive terms about how they felt, like “heartbroken,” and that the person they were investigating was a “shining example for men like him.”
[Side note: Social media is the most dangerous place to start judging people, since people tend to portray their lives on social media as they WISH they were and not always as they are.]
We are not judges, jurors, psychologists or mind readers. We are fact finders.
When investigators offer their opinion, they are essentially controlling the narrative and steering the client’s opinion in a certain direction. Not only that, the investigator may provide an opinion that they are not qualified to make so that the stated opinion is worthless.
In doing background investigations, for example, our job is to identify any potential red flags or issues in a person’s past in order to assist the client in making what is essentially a very important business or personal decision. It is of zero importance if we think that the person being investigated seems like a really nice guy because he donated to a charity for his birthday or if we think that he got a raw deal in life because he seems to love his family.
Of course, if clients want our opinion, we would provide some color and context. But we leave the decision-making up to them.
Let me be clear about something—when you spend hours digging into someone’s life inside and out, you will undoubtedly form an opinion of the person, that’s just human nature. And your gut feeling may help guide you down whatever rabbit hole you end up going down. However, when you are hired by a client to create a report, your personal opinion must remain in your head and never reach the page.
This is not just true in background investigations. If an investigator is doing surveillance for insurance purposes, it doesn’t matter much if they think the person they are surveilling is not injured, it only matters what the facts and evidence say.
Similarly, an investigator may think that they are being lied to by a witness during an interview, but unless they have some facts and evidence to back that up, it’s nearly useless.
As always, we will stick to collecting and reporting the facts.
We’ll leave opinions to armchair quarterbacks and keyboard warriors.
So well-written! I echo the importance of relaying the facts without inserting personal opinion.
Outstanding piece. It brought back to mind a case I had a few years back that was an administrative investigation for a County entity in my state. It involved an accusation of whether certain comments were made during a training event. Six hours of interviews. Twenty different people. Provided the report to the attorney and he exclaimed, after reading it…”Well, did he do it or not…where is your verdict”. When I explained that Private Investigators are fact finders and not judges, I could tell that he was very disappointed that I wasn’t going to offer to take that responsibility for him. We turn over rocks, the client can digest the results of what we find.
Thanks Curtiss! Sometimes it’s tough to check your opinion at the door but it is an absolute necessity.
Great post. A great reminder to keep opinions out of it and just stick to the facts. Nice job!
Thanks Matthew!