NZ Security36 February - March 2012

Association News NZIPI

Ron McQuilter is the current chairman of the NZIPI and is Managing Director of Paragon Investigations

Ron can be contacted by email: Ron.McQuilter@paragonnz.com

2012 and the start of a very busy year for the New Zealand Institute of Professional Investigators, the only New Zealand Private Investigation Professional Body. As such it is perhaps incumbent on us to pick up the pieces from some poor legislation. I refer to the recent introduction of the Private Security Personnel and Private Investigators Act 2010 governing our profession that took 37 years in the making, yet has some glaring issues one of which could destroy our good reputation committed private investigators have been working for years to create. Imagine letting a person practice law without any training or qualification. You just don’t believe it could ever happen. So what about just putting a Police uniform on any person with no training or experience and letting them go around in a Police car attending crimes and interviewing witnesses. Again, you would think the world had gone nuts. Why then would a new Act permit the Ministry of Justice to grant a person a Certificate of Approval to be an independent contractor Private Investigator without any training, qualification or other experience, just because the applicant happens to pay for a Crowd Controllers Certificate at the same time and just decides to tick the box for PI.

NZIPI Update

It gets worse, if a truly well qualified and experienced Private Investigator does the reverse and ticks to be a Crowd Controller then they will soon be required to sit an exam, despite the persons Police or other background. For this reason, NZIPI have decided to look very carefully at applications for membership whilst at the same time embarking on a soon to be released marketing campaign promoting that clients seek NZIPI membership status of their investigators. Perhaps, this is the only way a client could get some form of comfort that the person to whom they have placed their trust (and money) is at least regarded by their peers as a person fit to be a member of NZIPI. Some good news though is that our submissions to the New Zealand Transport Agency were well received and after lengthy dialogue access to the Motor Vehicle register has been granted to many applicants, of course on payment of the appropriate fee. By way of background, no Private Investigator in my 29 years in the business here has to my knowledge ever been taken to task over checking the owner of a vehicle. What was interesting in our submissions was when we discussed the necessity when performing surveillance to ensure you are following the correct suspect. It sounds obvious but from a privacy perspective how horrible is it if a Private Investigator was following you around because you unwittingly parked your car outside his suspect’s house and the Investigator was unable to determine the registered owner. This surely invades another’s privacy and also could allow a crime to occur while the wrong person is being followed. The granting of access does come with very strict reporting and auditing requirements with the onus on the Private Investigator to ensure accurate records of all vehicles checked are maintained and the purpose noted.

So with a positive start the outlook for 2012 is good for the members of NZIPI, or more importantly the clients we act for. The membership is united in our Code of Ethics and promoting ourselves as New Zealand’s foremost Professional Investigative Industry Body.

What happened to good old fashioned surveillancePI gets a flash new Snitch GPS tracker purpose adapted to allow it to be both hard wired and battery operated. The PI decides to test the battery life (expected to be four days). So the very busy PI plants the GPS somewhere were it cannot easily be found, then forgets where he put it That was on 29 September 2011 and it’s still missing.