Be Your Own Detective - Psychopaths and Lie Detectors

I saw a funny scene in a movie today.  Most that saw it probably did not even think about it.  The police hooked up a psychopath to a lie detector to see if she was telling the truth.  - Eh.

As I stated before in a previous post about Caylee Anthony:

• More appropriate details provided by psychopathic offenders compared to nonpsychopathic offenders when lying (but no difference when telling the truth)
• No difference in narrative length between the true and false conditions among psychopathic offenders, and for both groups, truthful narratives were longer than false narratives
• For psychopathic offenders, spontaneous corrections more frequent when lying compared to telling the truth. This is opposite to the finding with non-criminal populations - according to CBCA, the presence of spontaneous corrections is thought to be associated with credibility.
• Psychopathic offenders judged less credible than non-psychopathic offenders, even when telling the truth. Seven times less likely to be judged credible to be precise.
• Narratives produced by psychopathic offenders were judged to be less coherent overall than narratives produced by non-psychopathic offenders. 

Um - you know the real problem is that a psychpath does not see the difference between truth and what he or she wants to be the truth. So there is nothing to detect.  Then again, lie detectors don't work and the psuedo-science which is closer to voodoo than it is science known as polygraph testing is not reliable at all.

Be Your Own Detective - The Key to Surveillance - Patience

The title of this post nearly says it all.  Sometimes a 90 second video is all you need to "bust open" any case.  Well, the real story behind that is that it probably took hours if not days of surveillance to get that useful 90 second clip.

You have to be diligent and patient and ready during your surveillance.

Diligence:  Keep up with the surveillance if you have cause to suspect that your target will have the behavior you wish to catch in photos or video.  Keep up the surveillance can be difficult, especially if you are not paid for it - it takes time - sometimes many man hours to get a small bit of useful evidence.

Patience:  If you let yourself get frustrated or distracted during surveillance, chances are you will miss that little small chance to catch the suspected behavior.  Frustration is useless in surveillance and all it does is lead to useless expenditure of bad emotions.

Ready:  Have your equipment ready on stand by and extra batteries or recording media if needed. If you are not ready - that suspected behavior may only last a few seconds.  If you need to fire up the equipment and you are not ready - well, you miss out on the key thing you spent hours waiting for.

Also you may wish to practice surveillance and using your equipment before doing it for real.  Know the start up time of the camera and focus abilities, lighting, etc.  You do not want to experiment with real target and real surveillance and all you may wind up with is a bunch of blurry photos or video.  That or you may discover that you taking the vide causes too much attention to yourself.

Most of all, whatever you do - be safe!

Be Your Own Detective - Investigating Bailouts

I hate to get too political on this blog - as it is a how-to blog about how to be your own detective.  However, I am tired of spend thrifts in Washington D.C. trying to make like they are "helping us" with our money.
Instead of "bailing out" companies that conducted poor business practices, they could have just given each registered voter around five thousand dollars each.  We probably would have done a better job than some of these "financial institutions."

So, who are we bailing out?  Well, ACORN is getting about 20% of the bailout.  The same ACORN that has already been found guilty of fraud in voter registrations - and still has 12 pending cases of fraud concerning voter registration and voting.  But wait, maybe we need to bail them out because our government is going to use the same fraud-ridden company to conduct parts of the U.S. Census.  Yeah, if they were belly-up, maybe they couldn’t give as an “honest” profile of our country.

Barney Frank – what is he trying to do?  I think he wants us all to forget that he was the key player responsible for letting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fail under his watch.  Yeah he is all “we need AIG to not spend these bonuses” when as far back as 2003 he was warned that the two main financial parts of Federal Housing Loans were going to fail.  He chose to ignore it – then blamed it on lack of regulations.  So, what had he done to propose regulations?  If you guessed nothing, you are correct.

Well, I got that off my chest – Be Your Own Detective and investigate all of this.  Don’t just sit back and let your money go down the drain.  Investigate, then contact your representative or Senator about these issues.

Most of all - Stay Safe!

Be Your Own Detective - Investigating Banking Scams

So what about all the banking folks that made "bad investments" and now they are taking our money from us to bail out their bad choices? 

Yes, they are taking our money (our money if you paid any taxes). So how is that different than people arrested for investment scams? Bernard Madoff ran a business that sounds totally familiar with standard operating procedures of most banking institutions.  Continually offering bad loans and selling bad debts to others is not all that different than what he did.


A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned.  Sounds a lot like what most financial institutions have done for their "customers."

So if we jail some for scamming us - why are we rewarding the banks and bankers with bailouts?  All I know is that is a mystery to me.  I know the government would not bail me out for making bad investments.

Be Your Own Detective - Reasons to Investigate

We all have our own different reasons to investigate things.

Some people just "need to know" things. Some have lost friends or relatives - our more specifically friends or relatives that they have lost touch with. Some people are just protecting themselves from potential trouble - so they want to know about someone else. Some have criminal cases they want to investigate. Some have civil cases they want to investigate. The list goes on and on.

So why tell you this? You proabably already know all about this. Why I am telling you is simply because what you need to investigate or why - may effect the investigation techniques. If you are investigating anythng for any type of court, you need to first make sure what is acceptable in court. Take recordings for example. In Federal Court and many state courts - as long as one party is aware and voluntarily continues with the conversation, the recording is acceptable in civil and criminal cases. However, some states have laws that differe between civil and criminal cases on this matter. Also, some states do not allow any recordings made if it is over the telephone if either party is unaware of the recording. (That is why you get the line from the credit card company about recording calls).

Now recordings in public places where people are not expected to have privacy are always allowed. Then the only issue becomes do you expect privacy. In most public buildings and businesses - privacy is not expected like stores and resturants. Just look around - security cameras every where. Often signs are posted about surveillance - simply for that purpose - to tell you that you cannot expect privacy. With the posting of the signs - the recordings are acceptable in all courts.

This brings out a point about undercover operations. If you have any doubt that your recording will be acceptable in a court of law, simply arrange the meeting where such signs are posted, or even post your own sign ahead of time. I suggest a professional looking one vs. one you scrawled out with crayon.

Also civil and criminal court "proof" is quite different. In criminal cases - you need to prove to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. In Civil cases it is more preponderance of the evidence - in other words you have more proof than the other party.

The most important thing to consider on gathering evidence is safety. Whatever you do - so it safely! or in other words ...

Stay Safe!