Private Investigation and Policing

Private investigators in the media and drama are a common, curious, and appealing occurrence (Livingstone and Hart, 2003). Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Jim Rockford, Magnum PI, Philip Marlowe, Perry Mason, and Veronica Mars are just a fraction of a cast of hundreds who many of us have watched with interest. Security guards, by contrast, have rarely featured in dramas in comparison to their private investigator cousins, but when academic attention is quantified the position is reversed. The vast bulk of private policing research is dedicated to uniformed private security, with very little attention directed at private investigators (See, e.g. Button, 2007; Rigakos, 2002; Wakefield, 2003; Crawford et al., 2005; Thumala et al., 2011; Löfstrand et al., 2016; Nalla et al., 2017). There have been very few studies of private investigators, with the bulk conducted by Gill and...