In 1833, a French soldier named Eugène François Vidocq, a French soldier, criminal and privateer, founded the first known private detective agency, “Le Bureau des Informations Universels pour le commerce et l’Industrie” (Intelligence Office) and hired ex-convicts. .
The official police tried to shut it down many times. In 1842, the police arrested him on suspicion of illegal imprisonment and accepting money under false pretenses after having solved an embezzlement case. Later, Vidocq suspected it was a trap. He was sentenced to five years with a fine of 3,000 francs, but the Court of Appeals released him. Vidocq is credited with bringing record keeping, criminology and ballistics into criminal investigation. He made the first plaster casts of shoe prints. He created indelible ink and unalterable bond paper with his printing press. His form of anthropometry is still partially used by the French police. He is also credited with philanthropic activities: he claimed that he never reported anyone who had stolen out of real necessity.
After Vidocq, the industry was born. Much of what private investigators did in the early days was to act as police in matters that their clients felt the police were not equipped or unwilling to do. A bigger role for this new private investigation industry was assisting companies in labor disputes. Some of the early private investigators provided armed guards to act as a private militia.
In the United States, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was a private detective agency established in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton had become famous when he foiled a plot to assassinate then-president-elect Abraham Lincoln. Pinkerton agents performed services ranging from undercover investigations and crime detection to plant protection and armed security. It is sometimes claimed, probably with exaggeration, that at the height of its existence, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more officers than the United States Army.
During the labor riots of the late 19th century, companies sometimes hired armed operatives and guards from the Pinkertons and similar agencies to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of their factories. The most famous example of this was the Homestead strike of 1892, when industrialist Henry Clay Frick hired a large contingent of Pinkerton men to regain possession of the Andrew Carnegie steelworks during a lockout in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Gunfire broke out between the strikers and the Pinkertons, causing multiple casualties and deaths on both sides. Several days later, a radical anarchist, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Frick. In the wake of the Homestead riots, several states passed so-called “anti-Pinkerton” laws that restrict the importation of private security guards during labor strikes. The Federal Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893 continues to prohibit an “individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency or similar organization” from being employed by “the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia.”
Pinkerton’s agents were also hired to track down western outlaws Jesse James, the Reno brothers, and the Wild Bunch, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Pinkerton agency logo, an eye adorned with the words “We never sleep,” inspired the term “private detective.”
It wasn’t until the prosperity of the 1920s that the private investigator became accessible to the average American. With the wealth of the 1920s and the expansion of the middle class, the need for private investigators arose in Middle America.
Since then, the private detective industry has grown with the changing needs of the public. Social issues such as infidelity and unionization have impacted the industry and created new types of jobs, as has the need for insurance and with it insurance fraud, criminal defense investigations, and the invention of listening devices. low cost. In several countries, a licensing process has been introduced that has established criteria that investigators must meet: in most cases, a clean criminal record. This has been combined with modern business practices that have ensured that most investigators now have a professional perspective, rather than seeing the world of IP as a second career opportunity for retired police officers.
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