[tombert]

I feel like that is exactly what happens for anything but the most serious crimes. Keep in mind, a lot of internal investigations are not reported to the public and we never hear about them. Part of the reason that they're "internal" is so that they stay internal; we only hear about ones that leak.

Even for very serious crimes (e.g. sexual harassment or assault) these internal investigations end up being "sufficient", and the police don't bother.

[gruez]

Right, but unless internal investigations are somehow deterring investigations by prosecutors, I don't see what the issue is. Would you rather than there's no internal investigations?

[tombert]

I'd rather things like sexual assault get directly reported to the police instead of having people directly paid by the accused LARPing as investigators, yes.

[gruez]

You're dodging my earlier question. Do you think internal investigations are substituting for actual criminal investigations, and if so do you have evidence for it? All you're seemingly saying so far is that you don't like internal investigations at all, even if they are done when no criminal investigations would have taken place

[tombert]

I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.

By definition if the investigations weren't made public I can't know about them, but you can look at someone like Andy Rubin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin#Sexual_harassment_a...

As far as I'm aware there was never any investigation from real police for him.

[gruez]

>I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.

And how does this work? Are prosecutors really like "oh ok, we won't do any investigating of our own then"? If so, who's more to blame, the companies doing the internal investigations, or the prosecutors for falling for it? If the police show up to a residence to investigate a domestic violence report, and then one of spouses answers the door and says everything's fine, should we blame the spouse more or the police for not following up?

[tombert]

I think it is much simpler than what you’re describing.

Executive at BigCo does something bad. Normally people would report this to police and/or regulatory agency. Instead the company investigates itself to pretend they’re doing their due diligence so that there is a paper record, but with no intention of actually surfacing anything to the police.