Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: Garrity Warning

By David Lane Williams

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This month, I’d like to dovetail off a previous article on the Miranda Warning (April 2025) and talk a bit about the Garrity Warning, a cousin to Miranda that writers of true crime and crime fiction should understand. The Garrity Warning is issued to government employees, usually police officers, who are suspected of committing a crime and of violating departmental policy. 

Let’s use an example of a police officer who took a bribe to look the other way as two men robbed a bank, effectively delaying a police response until the robbers could get away. In this scenario, the officer is an accomplice to a serious crime, and he also violated departmental policy regarding graft and corruption. Our plot advances when one of the thieves is caught and makes a deal to inform on the officer in exchange for leniency. The corrupt officer is about to have a very bad day. 

As a cop, you know you must abide by a direct order from a superior officer (unless that order is, itself, illegal or unconstitutional). If a captain says you’re going to answer questions about a bank robbery, you’re duty and policy-bound to answer any questions the investigator assigned by the captain may ask. 

However, answering those questions would likely incriminate the officer in our scenario. He’s stuck between having to answer questions to keep his job or rank and wanting to exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Enter The Garrity Warning. 

In our scenario, there should be two different investigations. One is for the crime itself (accomplice to a bank robbery), and the other investigation is for departmental policy violations. Such a two-pronged investigation involving a public employee requires two different investigators. 

I investigated several such cases during my career. One involved a violent incident in which an officer had attacked his wife. My job was to determine the facts of the matter on the criminal side, which meant that any statement I took or evidence I collected would go to the prosecutor’s office and potentially result in the officer’s arrest. The other investigator was a police lieutenant who was investigating for the policy violation of “Conduct Unbecoming an Officer.” 

In such cases, I tried to be the first investigator to speak with witnesses. Witnesses may clam up after the first interview, so I tried to be the first in line. It didn’t always work out that way, but that’s how it goes sometimes. 

Anything I gained during my investigation was open book for the administrative investigation, but the opposite was not the case. In other words, that lieutenant was not allowed, due to the rights afforded by the Garrity Warning, to share what she’d discovered in the course of her investigation. This is always a bit frustrating for the criminal investigator, but it is the only fair and constitutional way to conduct an investigation. 

So, how does this apply to what you may be writing? Let’s say you’re crafting a novel about a good-guy cop who is being set up so that it looks like he took a bribe and helped bank robbers pull off a heist. The cop must endure an investigation and perhaps even a trial. The Garrity Warning, and all it implies, can allow you to raise those dramatic stakes. Now he’s not on trial just for the criminal conspiracy; his career, pension, credibility, and rank are all in peril. He’ll feel pressure from not one, but two investigations and two different detectives, all while still dealing with the real bad guys trying to set him up. Knowing how Garrity works can be part of your strategy for piling on the drama in order to reach a more satisfying and heroic ending. Have fun with it.