When people hear that Wes Bearden owns Bearden Investigative Agency in Dallas, their faces light up with memories of detective movies and private investigators in the comics. People immediately regard Bearden as a bad-guy buster who metes out justice wherever he can find it. It’s a big misconception, says Bearden. True, there’s a lot of reality in the idea of a private investigator sniffing through facts and clues for “what’s really happening.” But Bearden wants to set the record straight about where private investigators stand in the realm of law enforcement.
Here’s the thing: “The purpose of law enforcement is to catch the bad guys and keep the peace,” Bearden says. That’s not really what a Dallas private investigator does. Whereas a cop has to get out there and break up fights, a private investigator is in the information business. A private Dallas detective sifts through information, analyzes it, and reports the inductive or deductive conclusions to the client. The client is paying for a service, and that service is the discovery of verifiable knowledge based on evidence. Any legal action after that isn’t undertaken by the private investigator. But the client can use the investigator’s conclusions and evidence in court or at a hearing.
The FBI, police, and other federal investigation bodies certainly have training in law enforcement and detective work. But their jobs are not to provide the best service possible to any particular customer; they are not in private industry. The private investigator is in customer service as much as in detective work. Federal and state law officers ask a single question to guide their work: Is somebody violating federal or state codes? If the answer is yes, they find out everything they can to prosecute the offenders. But the private investigator has only the client’s interests at mind. The Dallas detective asks: “Is this the best way for me to find accurate information for my client?”
“People try to lump us all together, but private investigators as a whole have to be more versatile, more creative,” says Bearden. Law enforcement may have the power of the badge, but that work capacity also prohibits conventional law enforcement from focusing on serving specific people alone. The police officer is sworn to uphold the laws of the land, protect the people, and safeguard the legal ideas that hold the country together. But the private investigator owes allegiance to a paying clientele—which means zeroing in particularly on issues regarding the client and the client alone.
Bearden is also a lawyer, representing a general counsel of over 500 members. He and his colleagues don’t have the power of subpoena like the FBI and the police department does. They don’t have the power provided by a warrant or a badge. That’s why Bearden believes a PI has to be ultra creative in approaches to investigative work. Without the tools that police officers use to search a house and arrest suspects, Bearden and his team have to be crafty, intuitive, ever-vigilant, and above all, accurate.