NCIS chief interviewed

Navy Times recently interviewed the Director of NCIS.  Here is a question I found interesting and thought I’d share.

Q. There have been a number of recent cases in which inspector general investigations concluded NCIS agents weren’t following procedures. What are you doing to improve that?

A. I think if we have needed to we have tightened up quite a bit. I will give you an example: Some of the things we were cited for were actually minor deficiencies or violations of our own internal policies.

So there was a case where there was a bunch of sailors in a barracks shower. And one sailor bumped into another sailor in the shower. A few days later one of his buddies said he should report that as a sexual assault. So it gets reported. We get the referral a month after the incident, and what do we have for evidence? We have an empty barracks shower and we have no witnesses to interview. We have no suspect to interview. Part of our standard process is to photograph the crime scene and sketch the crime scene. Well, it’s a barracks shower. No one photographed the crime scene. But that gets reported as a deficiency in our investigative process.

Well, it is an investigation that clearly doesn’t have any merit that is never going to be prosecutable at any venue. In that case you can see where agents will think, well, I am not going to go through all the steps because there is really nothing here for me to do. So what we have encouraged is, because of the additional scrutiny from IG and others, is that it doesn’t make any difference; follow every step of our protocol regardless of the case. Do it anyway so at the very least we can say there is no prospective merit here — we did everything we were supposed to do.

You likely have clients as I do who are waiting months for an investigation to be completed.  Part of the answer maybe the lack of discretion afforded trained investigators to decide what effort needs to be put into a case.  Triaging is not allowed.