I retired from commercial detective and process service work a few years ago, and ceased my security training role in 2009. It’s just as well, really, writes our regular contributor Peter Whitehead.
The new digital age needs digital resourcefulness which old dogs could find hard to adapt to or even think of! A friend of mine runs a property services company, and the one day last summer I was drinking tea in his office when a call came in from an employee to explain that she was very sick and could not work that day. His receptionist finished the call, typed at her computer keypad for a few moments and then called the very sick employee back. After a short conversation the receptionist ended the call and told the manager that the employee had decided to come to work after all. She explained that this employee leaves her Facebook site open to all, and that she had told the whole world on it that she was going to ‘throw a sickie’ and go to the beach because it was such a nice day. I would not have thought of that; maybe you would have, in which case you belong to the new era!
Finding information and people in the old days was slightly different. Not all detectives had police contacts, indeed it was legally much safer to work in total isolation, but this required huge levels of lone-resourcefulness. Since nearly all of the old techniques are now unused, and detectives like Harry long gone, I thought you might like to read about some of them. It’s fairly obvious to all that a detective seeking a will beneficiary for a probate solicitor might expect to get more help from a reserved public than when seeking a debtor for an insolvency lawyer. That is what Harry experienced regularly. Strangely, he noticed that he received positive help from almost everybody when searching for beneficiaries even when they were unaware of why he was seeking them.
Harry felt that his speech and body language must vary in the different roles and that by turning all searches into ‘gift searches’ he could maximise upon help from the public. He decided that as long as a ‘gift search’ ended with a gift, and as long as strict rules were applied, such as never entering a searchee’s premises or taking the matter beyond the giving of things, that no moral code or law would be breached.
This is how it worked: Cecil, a shy debtor in hiding, needed to be found and positively identified so that a demand could be served upon him. Harry would go to Woolworths and buy something useful, like an emergency household tool kit, or a Mr Mouse egg-cup and saucer set, to give to the debtor. This would be wrapped up, with last known address entered on the package. Harry would use a motorcycle that day, and have a large shoulder bag to hold the parcel (with others) and a clipboard with many addresses on it. When faced with a motorcyclist clutching a clipboard and bag, and waving a package in the air, with an attitude of ‘it’ll just have to go back to distribution’, estate agents, letting agents, neighbours, relatives and all would do everything that they could to give forwarding addresses and cause a meeting with the addressee. At many properties, as soon as it was discovered that the call was for a package delivery, debtors would suddenly appear to sign for the item, in which case they would receive the delivery. The parcel would be handed over and the recipient’s signature be obtained for it, and no more. Solicitors would gladly paying the tracing fee and cost of the inexpensive gift, and in return would have the debtor’s signature and address. A process server could then attend, with a police escort if necessary, to serve documents. In this way the delivery and the service of the demand were never linked directly, and the technique lasted for years …. and years. Many people who never wanted to be found have stood on their doorsteps, clutching an Airfix Spitfire kit or a milk pan, and wondering who made the mistake of somehow sending a free item to them. In years, nobody ever ran down the road to tell Harry that there was a mistake and they should not have it ….. and solicitors often laughed as they read his reports.
Most companies would not release information about their employees to just anybody, but I recently called a security company to ask if an ex-colleague still worked there and was told that he had left before I had even identified myself. You might think that this information is safe and that the human resources employee who gave it is beyond blame, but I sometimes wonder how much we give away when we give out negative information like that. In this article I separate ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers into positives and negatives, but in fact every gesture, word or condition is positive information to a professional detective.
This article is to do with negative answers which can produce dangerous positives. Let me give a potentially horrific example. A primary school’s secretary has strict orders not to give any information about children at that school. So if anybody calls to ask if a particular child goes to that school the response would request the caller’s identity, explain that it is not allowed to give out any information and then give guidance as to where to write to. But this did not always happen. Not many years ago, a solicitor needed to find a parent who had moved home and changed the daughter’s school so as to avoid contact with the other parent. The solicitor needed to serve an urgent order in connection with the other parent’s right to gain access. As is often the case the situation had been overlooked until the last minute and so an investigator was landed with the problem of finding and serving the legal documents upon the itinerant parent at very short notice.
One fast way of discovering the parent and (soon afterwards) an address for service was by observing the approaches to the daughter’s primary school until the parent attended to bring the daughter to classes, as recognised from a photgraph. But which school? The detective had been told by his instructing solicitor that the parent had been seen twice within a county town and he believed that the local schools would probably tell him within a few minutes, by negative answers, which school he should to go to. Shockingly the schools were only protective about their own pupils, and relaxed if the enquiry was not for one of their own! The detective called all the local primary schools with the question, ‘I am calling to ask if Little Daisy Bloggs, six years old, goes to your school? I need to meet with her parent to hand over important legal documents for Bloggs and Bloggs, solicitors.’
You would not expect him to be told anything, would you? But the schools told him everything he needed to know. All but two schools told him that little Daisy was not at their school, because they relaxed as soon as they heard a name that they did not know. The detective observed parents delivering their children to the first of the schools that refused to give information and soon recognised the itinerant parent. In this case the detective did no wrong, but simply demonstrated the usual kind of resourcefulness that lone detectives have always needed, but the fact that a person with cynical motives could have used the same approach to find a particular child is horrible. So the guide to all people who protect others is: never make any comment apart from the establishment’s standard formal reply. One other point: over decades private and commercial detectives have needed to discreetly observe schools in connection with honest and legal reasons, and many have noticed that security procedures are seen to be more vigorous and active at the end of day than before assembly. That’s a obviously a security mistake.
I might write about other old-time detective techniques again, but there is one point …. Many of you would have watched television programmes about bad detectives, who for instance throwing muck over people’s car-windscreens so as to film them later on as they wipe it all off, et cetera. There is a big difference between detectives who commit criminal offences from those who use honest techniques. A technique which does not commit, provoke or incite any crime might still be criticised by a district judge, yet leave the detective’s reputation intact. I am sure that all professional security people will be able to distinguish the differences!
