Wednesday, February 29, 2012

AN INVESTIGATOR’S MOST IMPORTANT TRAIT

I have been asked many times what did I consider the most important trait an investigator can possess.  After many years in the investigative business, and working with many outstanding police detectives and private investigators, I believe the one trait the best ones all have is persistence.  The best way I can describe it is with the technique of canvassing a neighborhood looking for an eyewitness to an incident.  It is boring, it is time consuming, and you are constantly going from door to door with negative results.  But like I told a client recently, if you find just one eyewitness, you can break your case wide open.  If you knock on 49 doors with negative results, you keep going to the 50th one and hope to strike pay dirt.  Its going through reams of documents, its spending hours on the phone, it’s pouring through old records and court cases, just looking for that one nugget that will make your case. Its continuing to interrogate a suspect after you haven’t gotten anywhere in 2 hours, and finally asking the right question and getting a confession. Its the plodding, by the numbers, slow and steady investigators that consistently solve cases.