Criminal Justice is an exciting field. One of the most beautiful things about the profession is that you have many career choices. You have the option of not being stuck doing the same thing your whole career. One of the choices you have is that of being a Private Investigator. In this article, I will examine the role of the Private Investigator (PI) in the Criminal Justice field.
To examine the role of the private investigator in the criminal justice field, we need to understand the meaning of the words Private Investigator.
The word private means alone. This means as a private investigator your work will involve working by yourself or alone. You do not work with or work for a governmental organization or police group.
The word investigator means someone who does detailed examination and searches for the facts. Facts are needed to support a point someone is trying to make. Without these facts, the person may not be able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. This is where the investigator comes in. The investigator will help gather and examine the facts.
So to put them together, the private investigator works alone to help non governmental organizations or police groups gather information and examine this information for the facts. There are simply personal cases that governmental organizations cannot help individuals with. The private investigator’s role is to help these individuals.
An example is an attorney preparing for a court case. The private investigator can help this attorney gather and examine facts for the case.
Another example is insurance company that suspects someone of committing insurance fraud. This insurance company cannot simply accuse someone of committing insurance fraud. When it suspects there is such insurance fraud, it will employ the services of a private investigator to gather the facts to prove this suspicion.
The need for the private investigator to work in private is to allow him/her not to be detected by the people or person they are investigating. It must be pointed out that there are times a private investigator must work with other people. A private investigator working a case that requires surveillance may require someone to help setup and/or operate the surveillance equipment/s.
As can be seen, the role the private investigator plays in the criminal justice field is an important one. It’s a profession people interested in this exciting field should consider.