Why Hire a Private Investigator?

Hiring a private investigator sounds to many people like a last-ditch effort to uncover information where others have failed. That’s not entirely the case. Rick Roy owns Rix Investigations based in Phoenix Arizona, a full-service private investigation agency. Here, he explains why it can make perfect sense to let someone else do the work for you.

Why hire a private investigator? Because we have access to information that other people do not have access to. We have a knowledgeable database of background that includes a broad history about people, and we can obtain specific information about a particular person when others are unable to do so. Sometimes we have means that even law enforcement officials do not have.

We have specific access due to a number of reasons. In many cases, people trust us and not the police, so they tell us things they won’t tell the law. In other cases, information could be supplied to us through other means, and we could therefore have information which the police were unable to find.

Special Technology

If you think your spouse is cheating, for example, you need to hire a professional with the experience and equipment necessary to gather all the evidence needed - without alerting the suspect. We have all the equipment to do that. We have cameras with special lenses, tracking equipment, covert cameras that are hidden in eyeglasses, things like that. And we use digital recorders and digital video, with cameras hidden in watches, wall clocks, or buttons.

At Rix Investigations, we own and use every bit of that equipment. We get it through suppliers exclusive to private investigators, although some of it we build ourselves. The most recent item I built was a modified digital recording unit that would work for months at a time rather than hours at a time. We also installed a different microphone for better sensitivity.

No Guarantees

When people come to us, I tell them there is no guarantee to any job. I tell people that we are fishing a river. We will put lines and man hours out, and if there are no fish, we are still doing our job. But there are simply no fish in the river. The fish represent evidence of wrongdoing, and if there isn’t any, there isn’t any.

I might follow someone two or three days, and sometimes we come up with no wrongdoing at all. I was once hired to watch a guy for domestic infidelity. But we were unaware of the fact that after we were hired to begin the investigation, his father died. Nobody told us, so we followed him for two days as he made arrangements to bury his father. That’s all he did. No evidence of infidelity at all.

However, when a client hires us, we make a report of all our activities — what we did find or did not find, so he can make an informed decision about whether to carry forward or take it from a different angle. In the above case, it was just the wrong time.