A Pinkerton, hired by journalists.
So
1) not antifa
2) not progressive/anti-racist

Pinkertons continue their century and a half streak of killing protestors.

Denver police identify 9News security guard arrested in fatal protest shooting https://coloradosun.com/2020/10/11/matthew-dolloff-arrested-denver-shooting/

So... a brief history of investigation in the United States: until about the 1920s, there really wasn’t much that we’d call investigation.
We think cops are useless & brutal now? Sadly, ours are just reverting to the national, historical mean. Useless was a GOOD department.
2/

Unbelieveably corrupt was the norm.
Including the elected sheriffs.
(When only white men vote, the sheriff is the good ol boy they expect will stay bought for 2-4 years.)

And as now? The Boss Cop selected deputies for brutality and obedience. Not brains. Not logic.
3/

We have a fallacy that we’ve always had people who were skeptical, rigorous, objective thinkers who made the most of the scientific method with the tools they had.

This is a MODERN fallacy we encourage with historical mysteries, from Brother Cadfael through Sherlock Holmes.
4/

Briefly? Not so much.
The few who did exist mostly were NOT associated with law enforcement. They were doctors and academics, and tended to end up burned at the stake, under house arrest, beheaded...

Despots don’t like people who see the inherent illogic in authoritarianism.
5/

It’s worth recalling that even when we get to the Victorian invention of detective fiction (Wilkie Collins, not Doyle) the cops were rarely competent & the detectives were private consultants who worked for whoever paid them.
Which continued with Dashiell Hammett in the US.
6/

Most police departments didn’t have anything remotely like a detective squad.
Most cops were, at best, mall cops.
Muni cops came to exist because private business had been hiring night watches, but they were tired of paying, so convinced the city governments to pay instead.
7/

People who had the money to pay good defense attorneys often made use of private detectives, but there was no (supposed) neutral, official investigator.

Neither Brady disclosure nor Miranda warnings existed yet, so defendants were at the mercy of the cop shop.

8/

If you pissed off the cops, then something happened near you? There was a good chance you couldn’t prove innocence*. Because forensics?
Well... fingerprints, after 1910.
Blood typing? Not until the 1930s.

*not many DAs were solid on that “innocent until proven guilty* thing.
9/

And this goes exponential for everyone not a white dude (in a time when white barely meant Irish & definitely didn’t mean Polish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican) & applied only to wealthier white women.

(Sex or smoking could get women committed or imprisoned for delinquincy.)
10/

And sadly, a lot of the methods that the private detectives *did* use have stuck in our criminal investigative process. Like eye-witnesses.
Human memory is mostly unreliable, and if someone is uncertain, their memory will get more certain but less accurate with questioning.
11/

And lying to suspects, witnesses, attorneys. Plus actual torture — physical beatings to elicit confessions, sexual abuse, and psychological torture. (Not much has changed.)

12/

Oh... and this was the era of Spiritism. Psychics and seerers? Often consulted by police. Talking to the ghosts was considered perfectly fine.

(Hey, we still have cold-reading cons in law enforcement. We just call them profilers & polygraphists & spatter analysts now.)
13/

I’m trying to think of an era when cops actually got competent & investigation became objective (rather than steered towards prosecution) and I can’t. Maybe a few months in the early 90s? After DNA, before the crime bill? Nah, it’s always been investigate for the prosecution.
14/

Cops don’t like this, but their performance has been terrible for 150 years, and they keep doing the same things that are continually proven to be ineffective and unconstitutional, and when they’re informed they are not good at the job we give them, they riot.

15/

If you want a good set of case studies of late 19th and early 20th century policing & detection, give “The Man From The Train” a look.

There was a serial axe murderer in the US... who used the train system so well nobody even realized there was a serial killer.
16/

Oh, and that term didn’t yet exist, either.
But there were Pinkertons. (And some other competitors, but Pinkertons is like aspirin or Kleenex at this point...)
They were basically a private intel agency.
And they weren’t terrible at it.
Better than police, by a lot.

17/

From the 1870 creation of the DoJ until 1893, Pinkerton was what we used instead of an FBI.

The good things Pinkerton did: they hired women & people of color from the beginning.
(Didn’t always pay on an equal footing, but who did in the Victorian?)
18/

But Pinkerton, from inception, existed so employers could spy on & control employees. It was ALWAYS a service for rich people to dominate poor ones.
See above, re: despots.

Despots need finks, and the biggest despots in the late 19th century were the robber barons.

19/

Funny thing, there’s this federal law we don’t enforce much anymore, but it’s still on the books:

“That hereafter no employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar agency, shall be employed in any Government service or by any officer of the District of Columbia.”

20/

Public Law 52-208.
(Yes, this means no federal agency — including the Department of Defense — should hire any private security agency. No Academi, no Blackwater, no anybody. Plain language.

Something to get persnickety about when next your congress critter has a town hall.)

21/

And that law exists because in the 1890s, Pinkertons were mercenary strike breakers.

The Anti-Pinkerton Act exists specifically because of the Homestead Strike in 1892, when Pittsburgh ironworkers went on strike against Andrew Carnegie & Henry Clay Frick.

22/

But to be clear: it’s not because most of Congress had sympathy for labor unions in the 1890s.

It’s because the Pinkertons blew it in the Homestead Strike. They surrendered & the PA state militia (National guard, not white nationalists) had to be called in.

23/

If the Pinkertons won? 52-208 would probably not exist.

Passing 52-208 was an easy win for Congress — it looked like they were on the common people’s side, but they got revenge for Carnegie & Frick (the federal Pinkerton contract was probably near $1B a year in 2020 bucks).
24/

Plus, taking all of that money away from a company that hired women and black people?
That was a bonus for every reactionary in the room.

AND it told strikers that next time, there wouldn’t be 300 security contractors.

The states would just roll out the cannons.

25/

(If the only use of my odd side trips down historical byways* is to make it clear there was NEVER a golden age? This a win.)
(* this is research for my fiction. Some other time, I’ll bore you with 1829 & Robert Peel’s idealistic creation, the London Metropolitan Police.)

26/

The Pinkertons never went away. Dashiell Hammett, of The Maltese Falcon and Nick & Nora Charles, was a Pinkerton... for a time. He quit when he couldn’t tolerate the abuse. (And became an antifascist.)
As Labor began to win (&politics followed victory), Pinkerton diversified.
27/

But they stayed true to their origins — corporate surveillance. They’ve been moving back to security-merc services, because it’s lucrative.
Labor isn’t the threat now. (They’re still hired to spy on organizers, though.)
150 years later... they’re the same as they ever were.
~end

And now, the commercials!
I write books! If you like fantasy, politics, snarky female protagonists & murder have I got a story for you!

Vohan wanted Rien to follow him onto the throne. But now he’s dead and the law is... vague.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/891406

Kingdom is ALWAYS free at Smashwords, but if you prefer the ‘zon

Kingdom: http://amazon.com/dp/B07GTSXB4P 
(They don’t let me give it away, sorry.)