Investigative Techniques Quotes

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

Now that the mail is operating normally again, a horde of censors are busily slitting open letters to probe for hidden meaning among the trivia of family and business correspondence, and when in doubt they fall back on us.

You can’t report on something that you don’t know about.

The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

I am excited to be doing 'SVU' - I think there's a lot of inherent drama and a lot of inherent conflict in procedural shows. I have a lot of respect for police officers and the work that they do. There's a lot of nobility to depicting what these officers do on a day to day basis.

As a former attorney general. I have the greatest respect for the criminal justice system. But it is not good at intelligence gathering.

I know we journalists have a reputation for being cynics. We do. It's our job to question - everything.

It's definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways.

I want to go to police academy, I want to actually go out and make a couple of arrests. I want to go undercover.

Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.

I believe there are two kinds of journalists. One who sells a story by being creative, and one who sells a story by being sensationalist.

It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores…. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals.

A working detective has no hope of understanding what even experts who devote their lives to the study of criminal psychology can't figure out.

Trying to be Sherlock Holmes is like trying to catch an arrow in mid-flight.

I am an old journalist, so I always do a lot of research and dive deep into people's character, who they are, and their motivation.

At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.

At one point, I actually, ironically, thought I might go into criminology and work with the FBI.

The most important thing about my profession is finding the truth, finding the reality of these shows.

If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn't burned down a building in ages.

When 'The Washington Post' ran the first national story about FBI profiling in 1984, no one outside of law enforcement recognized the term.

I'm a reasonably accomplished journalist. I've worked as an investigative journalist, I've done crime beat stuff.

We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.

At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.

The best crime reporters don't mind charging in - but they also know how to do it as decent human beings.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.