What does Army CID investigate?
The general rule of thumb is that if it is considered to be a felony level offense under the UCMJ, CID is going to investigate. They also investigate all death investigations, where sometimes there’s not even a hint of a homicide or a wrongful death. In other words, when somebody takes their own life, or they just die of natural causes. If that happens on a military installation or potentially, that just happens to them while they’re serving on active duty, CID will investigate. The other most common crime that CID investigates involves all general levels of a sexual assault. Even from a touching, there was some talk and that kind of goes back and forth over the years as to whether or not CID should be taking and investigating all abusive sexual context.
That is just a touching of a breast or a buttock, or another private area. But they’ve kind of lost out on that battle. And they CID still has in what we call their purview to investigate all forms of sexual assault, even touching, they will not investigate sexual harassment that does not also involve a touching. The other areas where we see them investigate involves armed robbery, larceny fraud, those types of financial crimes. And we also see CID investigating drug offenses at certain levels.
Again, this is one of those areas over the course of the years, where they sort of wax and wane and what constitutes their purview for a very long time. They were not investigating marijuana, positive urinalysis, only if there was maybe some possession of marijuana and that sort of thing, then they would get involved, but not strictly for the urinalysis just of marijuana, but again, based off of recent events, that seems to have also changed. They seem to be now investigating all drug related offenses.
Jocelyn Stewart is a UCMJ court-martial attorney who specializes in defense of allegations of sexual assault for all branches of the military worldwide. Contact the Law Office of Jocelyn C. Stewart at 1-888-252-0927
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