About

José Arocho — Civil Rights Field Investigator

A California-based ADA field investigator, ADA tester, and Prop 65 / BPS consumer-safety investigator. Litigation-support consultant to plaintiff and defense counsel on accessibility evidence, chain-of-custody protocols, and investigation methodology.

Background

The investigator's geographic nexus is California. Field work concentrates in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast, the Sacramento Valley, and the greater Los Angeles basin, with a documented statewide travel pattern across the lodging, retail, restaurant, municipal, and public right-of-way verticals. This nexus is the factual predicate for the deterrence record described in Pickern v. Holiday Quality Foods Inc., 293 F.3d 1133 (9th Cir. 2002).

The investigator identifies as a person with a disability and personally encounters the barriers documented in any file attributed to him. Functional limitations and barrier-impact narratives are recorded contemporaneously in the language used at deposition, not reconstructed after the fact.

Prior work spans field investigation, accessibility documentation, and litigation-support consulting for both plaintiff and defense counsel. The methodology described on this site is the same methodology applied in every file and presented in continuing-legal-education engagements to California bar audiences.

Standing Methodology

A documented record, not a presumption.

ADA Title III injunctive relief requires Article III standing under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992). Within the Ninth Circuit, three doctrines combine to define a defensible record:

Deterrence-based standing. Under Pickern, a plaintiff deterred from returning to a noncompliant facility he or she otherwise would have patronized has suffered concrete and ongoing injury.
Encountered-barrier-plus-related-barriers. Chapman v. Pier 1 Imports (U.S.) Inc., 631 F.3d 939 (9th Cir. 2011) (en banc) permits a plaintiff to challenge barriers related to his or her disability beyond the specific barrier personally encountered.
Tester credibility post-Langer v. Kiser. Langer v. Kiser, 57 F.4th 1085 (9th Cir. 2023) holds that a plaintiff's status as a tester does not undermine standing where the factual record establishes genuine deterrence and intent to return.

Every investigation file in this office is constructed to document each element of this record contemporaneously — photographs with embedded timestamp and GPS metadata, dimensional measurements, and narrative explanations of disability- specific barrier impact.

Credentials & CV

Published record.

Investigation-methodology protocol — published in full on this site
Working relationships with named California CASp inspectors (no surrogate testing)
CLE engagements presenting the published protocol to California bar audiences
Methodology citations to Pickern, Chapman, Langer v. Kiser, and Davis v. Labcorp
Active investigation docket — see Ongoing Investigations
Named scientific advisor for the Prop 65 / BPS vertical

Field Investigators

Named, not surrogate.

Every field investigator operating under this office's protocol is personally identified and personally responsible for his or her own investigation files. This office does not operate surrogate testers under any other named plaintiff's identity. See What We Do Not Do.

Investigator profiles are published as each investigator joins the office under a named, public engagement. No placeholder identities are listed here.