| Private Investigators, the Law, etc. | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 24 2011, 11:28 PM (125 Views) | |
| Doghouse Reilly | Jul 24 2011, 11:28 PM Post #1 |
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Somebody's always giving me guns.
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If we're Noir, we need some PIs. Here's my thought as to why they might be prevalent in the city: The police force of the city isn't terrible. Really. It's by no means efficient, though, and it is rife with corruption and problems. The crime lords have the commissioner in their pocket. Most of the officers have been around long enough to become jaded. Any real hope of reform, or cleaning the city up, died a long time ago. What's left is a police force that does a fairly decent job rounding up petty thieves and random criminals, as well as out of town rabble rousers, but that does almost nothing to the entrenched criminal elements of the city. More than that, a part of ensuring that idealistic cops don't hassle Duke Ferrara or Lloyd Jenkins (http://s4.zetaboards.com/Silhouettes/topic/8895533/1/#post8147949) is that those officers who seem most enthusiastic and stubborn about fighting crime are invariably assigned to the neighborhoods where they can do the least damage, typically those not under control of any of the major kingpins. The end result of this is that getting any help from the police depends entirely on why you need it. If you've been hassled by someone with enough clout, you are basically entirely out of luck. Enter private investigators. While the cops may be subtly mercenary, PIs are explicitly so. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. Many are soldiers returned from the war, unable to find any other way to make a living. Some are nobodies desperate to make some quick cash. Some are reformed criminals themselves. Still others come from the ranks of those idealistic police officers, taking matters into their own hands. Whatever the background dealings may be, prosecution will follow evidence too serious to be ignored. It may be unlikely to stick, but that's not the PI's job. There is no organized network of investigators. They all handle their own jobs, inside (and outside) the law as suits their needs and desires. Some have partners, while others prefer to fly solo. Some get arrested themselves. Many are killed if they poke their noses into the wrong places. Those who aren't scrape by. Anyone who scores big gets out of the business, unless they're too idealistic, in which case they invariably stick their noses into one too many secrets. It's not a glorious job, but someone has to do it. |
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| Anderson | Jul 26 2011, 01:04 AM Post #2 |
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I'd like to make another point here: In this timeframe, the FBI isn't quite what we think of it as being. Hoover only got around to making it what we know it to be in the early 1930s, and it was hardly unheard of to hire PIs or a detective agency until the 1950s for a criminal case (partly because of societal inertia), to say nothing of a personal matter. I'd also make a brief point that some who did make it big would often go into security contracting of some sort (for example, getting "regular" work with a railroad or corporation) if they wanted to stay vaguely "in the business"...this is, after all, how most of the big detective agencies of the era (most [in]famously the Pinkertons) got started. If you want to develop longer-range plots, I'd suggest that such people and their businesses might well make interesting secondary antagonists later on (working for the "wrong side", so to speak). |
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| Doghouse Reilly | Jul 26 2011, 01:05 AM Post #3 |
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Somebody's always giving me guns.
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That is a very good idea. It also adds a possible aspiration for characters in that line of work. |
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3:51 AM Jul 11