Dr. DeAndre Redd, DBA, MSDS, CFE · Retired detective · Certified Fraud Examiner
That's how most of my conversations start, and it's how they started for nearly thirty years before I ever put my name on a website. Somebody sits across from me with a story that doesn't add up yet. My job is to find out where it does.
I spent those thirty years with the Chicago Police Department, most of them as a detective. I worked special victims cases, where the person across the table was often a child or someone who had been hurt by a person they trusted. I worked crime analysis, which taught me that individual events need context before I call them a pattern. And I spent a long stretch as a computer forensic examiner, pulling evidence off phones and hard drives and social media accounts before most departments had a word for that work. For part of that time I was assigned to a federal task force with the FBI, doing the same thing on cases that crossed state lines.
Somewhere in there I built a unit from scratch. Social media was becoming the place where people planned things, bragged about things, and left the trail that solved things, and nobody had written down how an investigator should work it. So I wrote it down: the intake rules, the documentation standard, the part where you tell the detective that what you found is raw and unverified until it's corroborated. I co-authored a university research paper on social media investigations and the law around them back when that was a new question. Most of the specifics have aged. The discipline hasn't.
A few things, mostly the hard way.
Before I believed one, I weighed the evidence, the account, the consistency, and whether the person could detail and substantiate what they were telling me. Some of the cases I'm proudest of are the ones where the accused turned out to have done nothing wrong, and I could say so with a file to back it.
You start from what you have. You read for what's missing. You talk to the person it happened to, then to everyone who might have seen something, and you write down the ones who saw nothing. You secure the records before anyone knows you're looking. You learn everything you can about the person you're going to interview before you sit down with them. And when you finally do, you treat them with respect, because respect gets more than pressure ever did.
If a stranger can't follow the case from beginning to end on paper, it isn't finished. That standard is the reason a prosecutor could pick up my work and use it, and it's the standard I bring to every report I write now.
When I retired from the department I took a different kind of job: chief administrative officer of a large municipal department, responsible for a budget of roughly seven hundred million dollars. It's a long way from an interview room, and it taught me something an investigator doesn't usually get to see: how money actually moves through a large organization, where the controls are, and where they aren't. Later I ran a county's minority- and women-owned business contracting program, which is where I learned how procurement works from the inside, and how it gets gamed.
For several years alongside all of that, I served as program director and chief data officer for a grant-funded nonprofit. That work put me in the middle of state and federal grant compliance, budget modifications, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and funding reviews.
Along the way I kept going back to school, because every job showed me something I didn't understand well enough yet. A master's in finance to understand the money. A master's in data science to understand the patterns. An MBA. A doctorate in business. And the professional credentials that matter in my field: Certified Fraud Examiner, and certifications in cyber and computer forensic examination. I started with a degree in psychology, which, looking back, was the right place to start. Every case is a person before it's a file.
The firm, for organizations that want this done for them, is ReddStrategy Group.
LinkedIn profile coming soon.
I won't promise recovery.
I won't take a case to make something go away.
I won't name people or live matters in public.
I won't tell you what to do in court. That is your lawyer's work.
I'm a father, and most of what I build now I build with the idea that it should outlast me. I've been writing down how investigators should think since 2006, first for a detective division, now for anyone who needs it. If you'd like me to speak to your organization, your conference, or your audience, the contact page is the right door.
