Life through a lens

Upon leaving the police service following 20 informative years in professional investigation, I made the decision to leverage from my vast specialist experience but I still wanted to stretch myself with different challenges. It was at that stage that the concept of Warwickshire Investigation Agency (WIA) was born. I had never run, staffed or equipped my own business before, indeed far from it. I came from a massive organisation where all of my colleagues were professionals, state of the art equipment was always to hand and job security was assured. Operating at a professional level such as that was the only way I new how to work and I was determined to replicate this with WIA, albeit on a much smaller level.

Surveillance was my specialism within the Police and so the focus of the services I would offer was clear to me. Whilst offering full investigative facilities, together with process serving, trace facilities and fraud enquiries, I made the the decision to focus my specialisms around surveillance and professional witness services. I equipped the agency with state of the art surveillance technology which included the latest in covert surveillance vehicles as well as live tracking facilities. The equipment however was of little use without the professionals to operate it. I soon found that identifying professionally trained surveillance experts is not to be an easy task. Some claim to be experts in the field but transpire to be self taught, others have surveillance experience but are from a military background where the language of surveillance can differ vastly.

Well, what to do now? I will only ever use experienced and professional operatives on WIA assignments, and on this I will not compromise. So, I gathered together various investigators CV's with samples of their surveillance work, both written and live footage, and began to hand select my team. I know from experience that to work as a professional surveillance unit, we must all speak the same (surveillance) language and most importantly must train on a regular basis.

So there was my next big challenge. Not to be beaten, I wrote a full surveillance training manual, tailored to exactly how I wanted the team to operate. Thus the WIA team was created. The team continues to train on a regular basis with specialist input from expert police surveillance instructors and continues to provide first class results for its corporate, retail and private clients.

To learn more about our specialist services, click on the highlighted links in the above text.

Having gained the permission of our clients, we look forward in our future blogs to bringing you news on just some of the cases we have worked on...watch this space!