The role of a Security Forces Investigator is unique; find out what it takes to do the job at Moody Air Force Base.

Transcript

I love being an investigator in Security Forces, I love my job. The problem-solving aspect, talking to people, just kind of figuring out what happened. You take a little bit of information and then in a week we have a 10-page report. I absolutely love that.

The importance of having a Security Forces Investigations section, essentially handle everything that’s outside of your first responder’s purview. Deal with any type of cases that require interviews with victims, subjects, you know, could be witnesses, whatever the case.

Our job is to be way more in-depth. Do more in-depth interviews, do crime scenes, collect evidence, preserve evidence, and then ship all that stuff off and do a very detailed report on basically what happened, all the facts and circumstances. And then we’ll go to court-martial if it hits that point. We do not charge people with crimes, we are simply a fact finding organization. As Security Forces Investigations, we look into everybody regardless of rank. Right, so we can do an A1C or we can be investigating a Major or a Lieutenant colonel. If there’s a violation in the USMJ that falls within our jurisdiction, we’re gonna take it. So we don’t wear uniforms, we don’t wear blues and whenever we talk to people we always say investigator because we don’t want people to know exactly what rank they are, so they can’t use that against us in the situation that they are a subject in an investigation. Part of our unique mission here, is to train defenders on the legal procedures. How to establish crime scene properly, how to collect and preserve evidence, and how to do a complete traffic stop as far as if you do find something, kind of the steps that you would take afterwards. So that way, you know it helps us out too. You know, if you have the confidence to make those traffic stops and go through the process of collecting that evidence, just your confidence alone is going to help us out on the back end. It’s going to help OSI on the back end. It’s going to help legal out on the back end.

We work with a high caliber of investigators. It’s very difficult to, you know, to become a Security Forces Investigator. So, it definitely helps me at my job and then defenders that I could count on and could work in my position if I’m out. I feel comfortable with them briefing the Wing commander or any, you know, leadership at that matter.

So, the benefit of being Security Forces and moving into investigations is you already have that baseline, first responder mentality. So, to move into kind of a detective aspect of the job it’s very easy and a lot of these guys are very good at it. Oftentimes I feel like we are on par with OSI on the type of interviews that we conduct, how we conduct our investigation, and how we close out our investigation. And that’s just being cop going into detective versus going from another career field into OSI.

I would say one of the toughest things working with would be the victims because we need to comfort them, but at the same time try to extract information. As Investigations, we want to gather all the facts so we can understand what happened so we can present that in our report.

We do a lot in domestic violence and child endangerment. So, we had a lot of stuff that emotionally is very challenging to kind of see and kind of help these people through what they’re going through. I think that was one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen while being an investigator.

We’re also out there as Community Police Program to help people out. In my experience, we’ve helped people by pushing their cars out of the road, to give them directions. One of my guys had to cut someone out of a seatbelt, so a baby was locked in the back of a car. So, we are acting as that capacity to let people know we’re not out there just looking for trouble, we’re out there because we want to help people as well. If you’re a victim of a crime, or know of any crimes committed, please contact Security Forces Investigations section, Warwick Base Defense Operations Center at 257-3108.