MINIMUM STAFFING, INSIDER TRADING, AND TECS - 093

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TRANSCRIPT:

This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, minimum staffing, insider trading and texts. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode number 93 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. And this week I'm answering your questions about what happens when a cop gets injured on duty and needs to go home, who handles the civil and criminal aspects of an insider trading investigation, and what kind of data is available to a detective investigating the homicide of a foreign national? But before we get into that, I need to give shout outs to my gold shield Patreons, Deborah Dunbar from deborahdunbar.com, C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicky Tharp at vickytharp.com, Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli, Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com, Lynn Vitale, Marco Carocari of marcocarocari.com, Robert Mendenhall of robertjmendenhall.com and Terri Swann, for their support along with my silver cuff link and coffee club Patreons. You can find links to all of the authors supporting this episode by going to writersdetective.com/93. And to learn more about using Patreon to grow your author business, or to support this podcast, check out writersdetective.com/patreon.

Ryan Elder writes, "Thank you again very much for your podcast. I love it and I find it to be very informative in my writing." Thanks, Ryan, I appreciate that. Ryan says, "I'm writing a screenplay and was wondering if when an officer has to get into a fight on duty and takes a bit of a beating, how much violence has to happen against them before they're chosen to be sent home and someone else would take over? For my story, I want the protagonist detective to have to be forced to get into a fight with a criminal while investigating a case, but I still want them to continue on in the plot after without another detective having to come in and replace him. And similarly, when it comes to the criminal who was in the fight that the detective has arrested, how injured would the criminal have to be to be sent to a clinic or doctor as opposed to being taken to the police station and interrogated? I was wondering if you had any information on situations like that and what would constitute being taken to a doctor or emergency clinic versus not? Thank you very much again for all your advice."

So let's start with your first question, Ryan, the decision on whether the officer wants to go home after the fight is really going to be up to the officer, not the supervisor. No different than if you were working as barista at a coffee shop and someone clocked you, the officer would essentially be on sick leave, just like they came down with an illness in the middle of their shift. Now, whether someone else would take over would depend on a few things, most agencies have a defined minimum staffing level for patrol shifts. Minimum staffing as the name implies is the minimum number of officers that must be working the street for it to be safe. Now, when I say safe, I mean safe enough for the other officers working to have sufficient coverage throughout the city and enough officers to be able to provide adequate backup if things get busy or violent. Now that number of officers is usually one agreed upon between the police department's administration and the police union representing the police officers on the street. And it's often based upon a ratio of patrol officers to citizens.

So this ratio is actually tracked as part of the uniform crime reporting, the UCR, that each agency sends to the FBI yearly. The ratio varies by agency and often as the result of population size and crime level and the number of calls of service they routinely receive. So a small bedroom community of a few thousand residents is going to have a far lower officer to citizen ratio, like 3.5 officers per 1,000 inhabitants. Than a city of higher crime and denser population like New York, which in 2016 reported 4.23 officers per 1,000 inhabitants. Of course the difference, that 3.5 versus 4.23 sounds like a weird number and not a big difference, but realistically it means 42 cops per 10,000 people versus 35 cops. And that 42 cops per 10,000 people is actually one of the higher officer to citizen ratios in the United States.

Anyway, with those ratios in mind, they will determine a staffing level that is considered the bare minimum for safety and that will be the minimum staffing level. So if the shift falls below that, so let's say Ryan's character ends up in a fight and wants to go home, but it happens on a day where one officer is off on vacation and another is at home sequester because of COVID. And having three officers off work on their shift, puts them below the minimum staffing level, then the supervisor will likely call in someone on overtime to get them up to that minimum staffing number. And that could mean calling in someone early that's due to come in for the next shift, like the fight happens mid day and the supervisor calls in a night shift officer early. Or it could mean ordering someone into work that's on their weekend.

The bottom line though, is that the injured employee is going to decide whether to stay or not because this is a worker's comp case and the supervisor is going to follow work comp protocols for the injured employee. Forcing the officer to stay when the officer wants to go home is just opening the supervisor up to liability as well as the department. Especially when that boss already knows a worker's compensation case is potentially in the works anyway.

Actually, as I'm rereading your question, Ryan, I see you're asking about the detective rather than a patrol officer. Well, the same thing would apply as far as whether they wanted to go home or not, but I don't know that it would automatically mean that the detective was removed from the case. Unless those injuries are so significant that the detective won't be back to work for awhile. I would imagine though, that the interview would happen pretty soon after the arrest, meaning within a few hours of the arrest. And not the following day when the detective returned to work, if they opted to go home. But as the author of the story, that's totally up to you.

As for the bad guy you asked about, any complaint of pain or any knowledge that the suspect may have been in an altercation or potentially injured is going to automatically result in having him cleared by medical personnel. Where I work, that means taking the arrestee to the emergency room and getting a clearance from the ER doctor. The jail will not book the guy without a medical clearance and again, this is a liability issue. Once they're in our custody, their physical welfare is our responsibility. The last thing we want is for this guy to die in an interview room because he suffered internal injuries from the fight or from the steering wheel after he crashed his car, whatever.

So even if the guy didn't have a scratch on him and we get to the jail and during the booking, the intake officer asks about complaints of pain or medical conditions. And the bad guy says, "Yeah, this cop punched me." Then we are automatically going to the hospital to get a medical clearance, whether there was ever actually an altercation or not, because it's really about liability. Essentially anyone that gets hurt, gets seen by the doc, whether they want to, or not. All because lawyers.

This week's next question comes from author Antony Davies of addavies.com who writes, "Hi, I have a small but important scene where a character is picked up under suspicion of insider trading, after being reported by a sleazy stockbroker, with email evidence that the suspect propositioned him with the trade. I've Googled around but the information on official sites seems to be quite generic and I was hoping you might have some specific insights. How much power does the SCC have over arresting people? Or are they more like a regulator who gathers evidence and then passes it to the authorities? I understand the FBI embeds an agent in the SCCs New York branch, so I'm thinking it'd be the FBI who interviews et cetera. Or could it be the SCC who investigates, interviews, then hands the evidence to the local PD, with the FBI there in case it steps into federal territory. Example, working with someone over state lines. I understand this might be a bit too specific, especially if the SCC isn't something cops deal with regularly. Thanks for reading. Great show. Antony."

Great question, Antony and it's one I had to do some research on actually. The SCC has a division of enforcement, which you can learn about SCC.gov and I will link to the about the division of enforcement page in the show notes, which you will find at writersdetective.com/93. But your assumption is correct, the SCC is the regulating agency and much of the work of the division of enforcement is to use civil law rather than criminal law to protect investors. And from what I can tell, rather than doing your traditional interview and interrogation kind of stuff, the SCCs division of enforcement uses attorneys and accountants rather than special agents to file injunctions in civil money penalties and civil orders for the disgorgement of illegal profits.

Now violating a court ordered injunction is a crime, as are violations of federal security laws like the insider trading laws, so those would be investigated by the FBI. So think of the FBI as handling the criminal side of the case and the SCC division of enforcement is handling the civil side or the money side of the case. I'm sure whatever the SCC uncovers as part of their civil investigation would be turned over to the FBI as potential evidence for the criminal case and vice versa. Just keep in mind that the majority of that evidence is not going to be interview and interrogation kind of stuff, so much as it is the actual numbers and dates and times and documents that they are able to get ahold of. So I hope this helps and definitely check out the link that I will have in the show notes.

A few weeks back, gold shield Patreon, Marco Carocari of marcocarocario.com, asked this question in the Facebook group and I wanted to share it here in the podcast as well. Because it may spark some story ideas and give you some insight into how we get started investigating a murder of a foreign national. So Marco wrote, "You're working a homicide but only have the hotel's Xerox of the murder victims passport, not the actual thing, no other identifying info, phone, computer, et cetera. The passport copy identifies the victim as Italian, what are your avenues for verifying getting more like how and when did he enter the USA? Does he have family in Italy and how to contact them? Are there databases for foreigners, nothing indicates he lived in the US and he's perceived a tourist. Or would the detectives contact Interpol, the local authorities in Italy, et cetera. Thanks for any feedback."

But before we get into my reply to Marco's post, if you haven't done so already come join the Writer's Detective Q&A Facebook group. The fastest way to get there is just to type in writersdetectivebureau.com/facebook into your favorite web browser and that will take you directly to the page for joining the group. So back to my reply, this is what I wrote to Marco. The detectives would contact the FBI or DHS, Department of Homeland Security, to have them check the TECS computer database and TECS is spelled T-E-C-S in all capital letters. According to DHS, the modern TECS system is not an acronym, however, it used to stand for, back when I was working these cases, it used to stand for the Treasury Enforcement Communication System. TECS is the database that stores the data from all the customs forms you fill out whenever you enter the country, you know the forum you get on the plane just before landing on your return home from vacation. Only to have CVP make you fill it all out on the computer, make you wonder why you filled out the paper form in the first place. Yeah, that information.

So a TECS inquiry would get your detective the person's address in their home country, as well as their intended destination in the US, along with their occupation and whether their visit was for business or pleasure. Contacting the Italian embassy would be a logical next step as well, especially if the detectives are attempting to inform the dissidents next of kin of the death. So that was what I wrote to Marco in the Facebook group, so to add to what I posted in my reply. Think about all of the information you put on a customs form whenever you enter the country, whether that's returning to the US or when you travel to another country. Think about all of the information you're putting into that country's database, your occupation, your home address, the address you'll be using while in country. So that means your hotel, or your Airbnb, or that distant relative you're visiting for the first time in decades. That is all information that an investigator or someone in an intelligence service may have access to.

Now as a local cop, as I mentioned in the original reply, I have to get a fed to check that TECS database for me. So I don't have access to it on the computer at my desk or in a patrol car, but it's certainly something the cop could get from the feds in a homicide investigation. If it looks like the investigation ties back to the decedent's country of origin, then you might be working more closely with the FBI from that point. Where the FBI would arrange for any interviews to be done overseas using their Legat or their Legat's contacts in country. Meaning in this case, like the Italian police.

And I talked about Legats or more accurately, the FBI special agents assigned overseas as legal attache, way back in episode 54. And the title of that episode was physical agility, foreign nationals, and missing children. So go back and listen to episode 54 or you can read the transcript at writersdetective.com/54 to learn more about the job of an FBI Legat. And I think I also talked about Legats when I was interviewed by Joanna Penn on The Creative Penn podcast.

Anyway, I hope learning about the TECS database and where they get their information helps spark some story ideas for you. Thank you so much for listening this week and don't forget, I need your questions. Send them to me by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. Thanks again for listening, have a great week. Wear a mask and write well.

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