Most people think that private investigators are hired simply to catch cheating husbands. Although that is one area they certainly do specialize in, investigation firms are involved in a lot more than just that. Rick Roy, who owns Rix Investigations based in Phoenix, Arizona, talks here about what his full-service firm of private investigators really does.
A private investigator is someone licensed by the local enforcement authority to conduct investigations relating to non-law enforcement issues. Now somebody else will come along and say that’s not entirely true — that we also take on cases where law enforcement is involved. But in my opinion, the bottom line is if the law enforcement is involved, we don’t want to be involved. That is my take on a private investigator’s duties.
Some activities relating to this which a private investigator would take on would be surveillance, background checks, missing persons, spousal infidelity, kidnapping, custody law and corporate business. A lot of the latter involves being hired by a business to watch employees, in effect to keep an eye out for employee theft and defrauding.
Flat-Fee Basis
I run my firm on a flat-fee basis, which means that when you hire me, I agree to provide a certain amount of working days in exchange for a payment that we agree on. During the time, you hire us and you will deal directly with one investigator throughout the entire investigation, no matter what. The reason we do that is to avoid confusion so that way there is only one story being told to the client.
If you were to say that we “spy” on people, I would give you a specific response to that. I would say that spying, to me, denotes a trait of espionage, which is something we do not deal in. We do observe, we do conduct surveillance, we do conduct covert operations, we take hidden videos and hidden photos. Still, I would not categorize any of that as spying since no law enforcement is involved, and no governmental interest is there either. In fact, we absolutely follow the law strictly in regards to the actions that we take. Our actions are all legal because we are licensed to perform them.
Different Licensing Laws
Every state has different licensing laws concerning private investigators. Here in the state of Arizona it varies according to the area. Here you are required to have 6,000 hours of prior experience, either through law enforcement, the military or through another private investigation service, before you are considered a licensed private investigator.
That means that when hire someone from Rix Investigations, you won’t be short-changed with cut-rate employees who have no experience. You can rest assured that you are hiring only the best, and that we use cutting-edge technology and state-of-the-art equipment to get our job done virtually undetected.
