Difference between a Private investigator and a Professional investigator
What is the difference between a private investigator and a professional investigator is a question I have been asking myself lately. Which one am I? A private investigator or a professional investigator? Lets have a look and hopefully I can avoid all the confusion.
I have noticed recently a trend where members of trade associations, including the Association of British Investigators, IPI and WAPI have started calling themselves “Professional investigators” rather than “Private investigators”. Also on social media platforms such as Linkedin people calling themselves as such. From what I can work out this is because they want to disassociate themselves from the seedy image of a dodgy PI that maybe conjured up in the mind of the general public. After all in the UK it is an unlicensed industry and just about any Tom, Dick or Harriet could arm themselves with a camera phone, a car and a cheap website and in essence call themselves a private investigator!
Before I go any further I must give credit for the inspiration of this post to an Australian website where they discussed the difference between a private detective and a private investigator. They drew their own conclusions on this which I will let you read yourself if you wish but I’m not going to throw “Detective” into the mix in this post to confuse things.
To find the differences between the two we need to delve deeper to see what the differences are. What exactly is a private investigator? A private investigator (or detective) is someone that carries out investigations for private, legal and corporate clients. A quick google gives this reply” A private investigator (PI) is a person or company that is hired to gather information and evidence about a situation or problem. They are often self-employed and work independently from law enforcement”.
What exactly is a professional investigator? A professional investigator (or detective) is someone that carries out investigations for private, legal and corporate clients. A google search for the term “professional” investigator comes back with little meaningful information so I will answer it myself. A professional investigator (PI) is a person or company that is hired to gather information and evidence about a situation or problem. They are often self-employed and work independently from law enforcement.
As you can see they are one and the same. They both do the same work, whether that be checking on a wayward husband getting his leg over elsewhere, serving process, corporate investigations, tracing enquiries etc. Trying to rename yourself just because of some bad eggs that you feel have tarnished the industries name is silly. The building industry has cowboys so do they change their name from builders to professional constructors? Of course they don’t. Yes there are some dodgy characters in the PI world (and in every other industry) but just because one day the dodgy guys start calling themselves “Professional” does that mean they have changed? Does calling yourself professional mean you are more proficient?
Remember at the beginning when I said that anyone can set themselves up as a private investigator overnight? Well it’s just as easy to do the same thing and call yourself a professional investigator.
What is the answer to my question am I a private or professional investigator? I will stick with private investigator, thank you very much. This way I am not trying to make myself sound better than anyone else when I’m one and the same. Could you imagine telling someone that you are a professional investigator? Straight away there would be questions as to what exactly this is. “are you a policeman” ? “An investigative journalist”? “Oh you mean you’re a private investigator” is how I guarantee the conversation would conclude.
The main reason I will carry on calling myself a private investigator is this. I guarantee you anyone looking for our services isn’t typing “Professional investigator” into their search engines. Carry on calling yourselves as such and you will be missing business that will be coming my way thank you very much sir.
My advice to anyone looking to hire a private investigator is do your research. Don’t just look at the best looking website. Read our blog post on how to choose the right investigator for you.
© M.R.Investigations October 2024.