Between You and the Bad Guys They’re Trying to Take Your Stuff and Steal Your Identity May 2006

by Roger Short, PI
Photos by Russell Byrne

I grew up all over the place since my father was career-military. He spent 25 years in the Air Force, and retired as a Captain in 1969. It was a significant achievement since not many African-Americans in those days made it into the officer ranks. After retirement he moved to LA and outlived his days of active service by only three years. My father’s tragedy is an old story since many servicemen pass away within the first three years of retirement because of stress created by the dissonance between the enforced discipline of their previous service and the chaotic lack of structure of their civilian life. He was only 42 years old. I was 14.

Oakland Lawman
My dad was a great man! He believed in education. I attended college for a year at LSU and enlisted in the Air Force. I served as communications specialist for 12 years, mustered out in 1989, and joined the Oakland Police Department two months later. I eventually received my bachelors degree in Administration of Justice from Cal State Hayward, and a masters degree in Public Administration, also from Cal State Hayward.

I served for 15 years with the Oakland Police Department and spent the first eight years as a cop-on-the-beat in East Oakland, which is one of the roughest beats in a notoriously tough city. The 700 officers in the Oakland PD were a band of brothers since our lives sometimes depended upon each other. Because of the nature of the job, and the finely tuned selection process, there are very few racial problems among that group of men. The department does a great job considering its limited resources and the enormous challenges facing it.

Following an on-the-job injury I became a Criminal Investigator and spent the next seven years investigating all kinds of crimes beginning in the Burglary/Theft Unit. I conducted burglary investigations for a couple of years and really liked the work. I began to focus upon the growing crime of checks and credit-card frauds and discovered that I had a knack for that kind of investigation.

I learned from apprehended criminals the methods they used to commit their crimes. They could sometimes smash a window, of course, or jimmy a lock and kick open a door. Sometimes they would climb through an open second story window. In some cases, they said, people would store a ladder by the side of the house and leave their second floor windows open. Trash cans and fences also provided access to the upper story windows. The more athletic thieves would climb a pole or a rain gutter to second floor windows. Victims would say, “I can’t imagine how they got in,” then I would show them, and they would say, “Oh, right!”

After a couple of years I left Burglary/Theft and moved to the Robbery Unit where I began investigating everything from muggings to bank robberies. The Oakland crime scene provided us with many opportunities to ply our law-enforcement trade. The situation is getting better, but there is still a lot of rough stuff going on.

After a year working in Robbery, I moved to the highest category and became an Investigator in the Oakland Homicide Unit. I spent two years there, and it was one of the best jobs I ever had in my life. Nothing gives me more satisfaction than bringing to justice someone who committed the ultimate crime.

It wasn’t easy work, however. The position required me to spend substantial amounts of time away from my family. I would sometimes leave work at four, and before I had eaten dinner I would get a call back to work on a murder case. I would run with the case pursuing clues, interviewing witnesses and the family, and following the leads I got. Such sleuthing might take up to 20 hours so I wouldn’t get to bed until two days following that dinner that I had missed.

Law enforcement investigation takes a toll on a person. It requires a lot of thinking and sometimes using gut feelings and advanced communication abilities. Some guys stay in that kind of routine for a decade or more – and many of them end up getting divorced.

Learning the Investigator’s Trade
Our successes made us feel good, but the success rate was a little disheartening. In two years I worked on 15 cases, we identified the suspect in 11 of these and convicted three people. It is never enough to know who committed the crime if you aren’t able to satisfy evidence standards that are weighed heavily in the criminals’ favor. Jurors are reluctant to send someone to prison for life on circumstantial evidence. Cases often take four years just to go to trial and many more years before the progress of appeals is finally concluded. Those eight suspects that walked free got away with murder.

I returned to the Theft Unit after two years, when one of the Investigators became injured, and took over fraud investigations. I really liked that work! It was like a game of cat-and-mouse. I had to follow a paper trail of crimes that would lead me to the criminal. Many times the easiest trail led through checks that had been fraudulently cashed. Many banks and stores these days require a thumbprint, which would lead us to the person. In other cases we would have an image from a security camera and could broadcast pictures to officers in the field who would show them to their informants. We would often catch some petty criminal who had written a bad check, for example. They would tell us, “I’m doing this small time. Drop this to a misdemeanor and I’ll give you someone doing checks and credit cards big time.”

Potential informants wouldn’t want to tell us anything because they had to go back onto the streets where they might get in trouble because of their cooperation. We had to make it worth their while. We would catch them doing some petty crime and make a deal. This kind of thing works at all levels of law investigations. It is all about leverage. Most of our progress came from going through the little fish in order to land the big ones.

One advantage is that these low-life people have no sense of honor or loyalty. They would do anything to protect themselves. “No honor among thieves,” is more than an expression. Any of them would sell their mother down the river if by doing so they could protect themselves from some problem.

I concentrated my attention for three years on general fraud investigation including credit card fraud, check-writing schemes, identity-theft, and Internet fraud. Oakland didn’t have a large Fraud Unit. I was the Financial Crimes Unit all by myself. Other investigators would assist me when I needed help. That was uncommon, however.

My career as a patrolman had come to an end when I tripped and fell while chasing a car thief. After three surgeries I was on modified or light duty. My knee never fully recovered, so I retired.

I’m the kind of person who would go crazy sitting at home watching daytime TV. I got my Private Investigator’s license in November and went back to work. My services include identity theft resolution, background investigations, pre-employment screening, bodyguard service, and process serving. I have a lot of camera skills and good interview skills. That last is especially important because people shut down if you don’t talk to them the right way.

Being an ex-cop gives me a good in with police. I can talk their language. I know the routines and understand exactly what they aren’t able to do and what they can do with great effectiveness.

Protecting your Identity
A lot of people are being stupid with their identity. They get into trouble needlessly because they fail to observe a few simple rules.

1. Don’t use mail boxes. We call the little flags on mail boxes, “Steal Me Flags.” Thieves drive around looking for those flags and then steal the contents. They steal bills and get check numbers, bank account numbers, account addresses, and often Social Security numbers.
2. Use the Post Office to mail letters. If you pay bills by check bring the mail to the post office and drop it in the inside bin. The outside ones often get ripped off on the weekend. Thieves will tie a line on a big rat trap and then throw it into the mail slot. The trap catches mail containing checks, returned credit cards, and sometimes cash. A variation of this is to wrap a piece of cardboard with duck tape, sticky side out, and drop it in the mail slot.
3. Don’t personalize your checks. People often print name, phone number, address, license, and sometimes their social security number on their checks. They can’t know for a month that the check they wrote didn’t arrive. Thieves not only steal checks and cash them, but they might change a $25 dollar check made out to PG&E into a $2,500 check made out to cash by washing names and amounts off a check with simple chemicals. If you use custom checks, print only your name and address on them.
4. Check your credit report quarterly. People can run for six months with your credit card unless you keep track. You’re only responsible for $50, but that’s 50 of your dollars. Much worse is the fact that it takes an estimated 500 hours for a normal person to clean up credit once they become a victim. You have to be persistent otherwise it will come back to haunt you. Any victim knows how haunting this can be – how crazy a process that is. Or people can hire me. I can do the same job in 20 hours, or less.

My work as Private Investigator is my life’s Plan B. If all things had been equal, I wouldn’t have gone to a city other than Oakland and would have retired as an Oakland Police Officer. Oakland is a great place to live and to work; service as a policeman is a noble occupation.

But I’m having a good time in my new role as an East County Private Investigator. I lived in Oakley and recently moved to Brentwood. I like the East County and have come to love many of the people out here. I’m glad to serve them by providing a barrier between these good people and the bad guys that are, unfortunately, out here too.