LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 49 – Investigation & Interviewing, Coercion, and Interrogation Training ft. Dave Thompson (Wicklander-Zulawski & TalkLP)

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Returning guest Dave Thompson of Wicklander-Zulowski and TalkLP enlightens us on coercion, investigative and interviewing training, the evolution of interrogation practices, differences in techniques & when to apply them, the TalkLP podcast, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 49 – Investigation & Interviewing, Coercion, and Interrogation Training ft. Dave Thompson (Wicklander-Zulawski & TalkLP) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. Bosch integrated security and communication solutions span zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, a podcast. Today, we're joined by Wicklander Zalosky's very own Dave Thompson. Dave, why don't you introduce yourself and

maybe give everybody a quick background on how you've moved up the ranks and then currently what you're up to, if you would, please. Sure. Thanks, Reed. Thanks for having me. This is my second time on the Crime Science Podcast. So you guys are doing some great work. So excited to be a part of this. I'm excited to represent both WZ and the Talk LP podcast that is hosted with Amber Bradley and myself. And at WZ, as you mentioned, moving up the ranks, I don't want to give myself too much credit. I think a lot of it was probably to be in the right place at the right time and being surrounded by the right people and having the right mentors.

So there's a lot of people, I'm sure, listening to your podcast that I know have had a significant impact on my my growth and development over here at WZ but currently I'm our vice president of operations and and one of the three partners at Wicklander Zalowski and my my current role outside of teaching our programs is really focused on day-to-day operations of the business. And of course, in our current climate is kind of evolving and innovating the way that we provide and deliver our training in a more remote virtual environment. So I know the word innovation is not foreign to you guys over at LPRC. No, that's great background. And I know that you've made a couple visits in here to Gainesville, spent some time with us the first time we went and visited with some of the criminology faculty and one faculty member in particular that she studies jury behavior, but also studies interviews, interrogations, coercive versus non. interviews, interrogations, coercive versus non.

And so you all had what seemed like a good and light discussion. And maybe at first, let's kind of, if we can, explore a little bit, and I don't know if I'd call it a passion, but how you're leveraging your experience and your expertise and your inquisitiveness in looking into the right and maybe not so right ways to get people to talk about things that they might have witnessed or increasingly maybe what they've done. So, Dave, you could kind of talk a little bit about what you look at, how you're looking at it, and particularly when it comes to coercion? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think you did mention my visits down to UF.

I've got to be careful because I know I've got some Florida State people that are listening and UF people listening. So I'll stay away from comparing two beautiful campuses. But I do know some of the technology and some of the innovative things you guys are doing at LPRC, I wish I had when I was in the field conducting interviews and doing investigations. Pretty neat things that are being put together out there. But from the question you asked about coercion, and I would call it a passion of mine. I think it's been probably three or four years now that really one of my passions and one of my main projects personally and with WZ is in the world of wrongful convictions and false confessions.

And at Wickland-Roslowski, we've made a lot of changes in our curriculum over the last few years to really focus on, not just to make sure we're providing good training on how to conduct interviews and interrogations, but also being aware of the fact that these skills that we're training people on, if used the wrong way or if not used at all, can easily result in some miscarriages of justice. And I had the chance to have some involvement, at least supporting a Brendan Dassey from the Making a Murderer case and his legal team. And really from there have been focused on how do we impact change? How do we lead change as thought leaders

in an industry of interview and interrogation? So meeting some of your faculty was a great part of that. And it's been really neat to collaborate with academics really at this point across the globe on making sure that what we're training avoids coercion and still gives investigators tools to get to the truth in any case. That's excellent. So one thing as I get on to via the University of Florida, I can get on, of course, as faculty to search all the academic databases out there. And in almost all journals that are digital, we have access to. And so I'll go on there and do keyword searches on, of course, robbery and burglary and shoplifting and other relevant issues.

But because of you, I also look up, you know, coercive interviews or interrogations and so on to kind of interrogate the literature around that and see where is the world and what research has been published on that area that is so important. dedicated first and foremost to safeguarding vulnerable people. In this case, typically the crime victims, because we know the physical and the mental effects of even a property crime against somebody can last not only a lifetime, but sometimes it can be multi-generational. But we don't pay enough attention to there are other victims and those are people that are wrongfully accused. And, um, and so, uh, and I find it interesting and, and beyond useful, you know, what you're trying to do and all it's going to do, it seems in my opinion is the more research and the more expertise you, you all develop and help train, uh, those that are out in the

field conducting investigations, whether law enforcement or loss prevention, makes their investigations stronger and better and also probably provides a lot of confidence to employees and managers and others in the field or corporate offices that the AP or LP team, in this case, or law enforcement, are really skilled investigators, including their interviews, and that they have the best interest at heart. Really, that's getting to the truth. Yeah. And I think, Reid, I'm glad you brought up some of the, from a research standpoint, a lot of times when we talk to people in the private sector and we use a term like coercion or false confession, and the LP industry often doesn't maybe connect the dots as quickly. And I think, you know, that's something that happens in the criminal world. That's something that happens with a homicide case.

And it does, we know it does. But in the private sector, you know, people need to be aware of what are we saying in that interview room that gets an employee to who stole $3,000 to admit to $10,000? Or the complainant of a sexual harassment case, are we interviewing that person with trauma-informed interviewing experience and a strategy? And I think sometimes we got to think outside the box as interviewers of who else are we victimizing when this is done the wrong way? If we don't believe a victim or don't at least give the complainant a chance to tell their side of the story, now we've got not only a victim on that side, but potentially other victims that they're going to share that experience with, that interview with, that don't want to come

forward. And you have an accused person who's going to continue to re-offend because you didn't address it. And if it's a theft or fraud case, of course, then the organization is going to continue to be victimized if you don't have the right person. So definitely an impact in both the public sector and in the private sector from the investigation through the interview of some of these errors that are common to happen. Excellent. What are, you know, if we could, I know we're kind of going off on one direction, but you mentioned the DASI situation or some of the other cases now that you've examined or worked on. Are there some common threads or themes? Is it incompetence?

Is it just incompetence in interviewing? Is it lack of training? Or there's some intent in there? What are some of the things that you all are uncovering and you think, and I think this is the most important, that are probably fixable, trainable for field investigators? Yeah, I think that's a great question. That same question actually came up.

I was on a call with some other attorneys that represent cases like this, and a similar question was brought up. And I think the most common denominator in the law enforcement world is most of the investigators are doing what they were trained to do. Unfortunately, their training might be a little dated.

And as you mentioned earlier, as we continue to embrace research and look at the appropriate way to have these conversations now, what was done five years ago, 10 years ago, two decades ago, we've learned can cause some unnecessary risks. So I think the most common denominator is what's the quality of training, who's conducting the training. And we've seen organizations that try to kind of train a trainer. And then eventually over time,

you get this domino effect of, I train you, you train somebody else, they train somebody else. And it results in some filtered down bad habits of what happened at the end result. So I think that's one of the main factors. When you look at false confessions more scientifically, and you look at the research behind it, really the common causes of all of these issues are coercion, which could be threats or promises in some way, some implicit, some explicit. It could be contamination, where the interviewer is actually revealing information about the crime that only the guilty person should know? And lastly is misclassification. And it's, you know,

how did that, how did a potentially innocent person become a suspect in the first place? Did I interpret behavior the wrong way? Was there a bad eyewitness, you know, identification, or were the forensic sciences wrong? So I think frankly, there are some players out there that do have bad intent, but I think that's few and far between. I think for the most part, it comes down to training and cognitive biases that investigators have. That's interesting. I remember years and years ago, all of our team, this is how old I am, went through the Johnny Reed course. That was all that existed. And then though, when WZ split off, redid their program.

We all went through, and this is at Ross Storrs back in the day. Then we all went through Wicklander-Zaloski 1, WZ 1. And then later they had an advanced course, and we went back through that. And then went through sort of a touch-up course. And all of us got the audio tapes and the little brochure guide. And I can remember, you know, my father's medical practice. And I think you and I have talked about this. He said, I think, you know, one of my team is stealing from me, you know. And I thought, well, he goes,

what can you help me do? And I thought, wow, you've given me free medical care for my entire life. The least I can do is look into this. So I had to go find the WZ tapes, pull the brochure out, our little guidebook, go through this thing. And it had this little laminated card for your wallet. I pulled that out, reread that, go to his office. I started asking him, how did you get money? And you have a patient list and that reconciles with this list and that reconciles with a bank deposit and all this stuff. And figured out, wow, I think she's stealing co-pays and money from medical books that are sold at cost and all that kind of stuff. So we sit down in his office.

I take everything off the wall and I'm doing all these things that we all learned. And back then in the day and sit down with her. Well, then just as I'm starting to talk to her and she's starting to talk to me, he comes in, sits down and stares at her, you know, while we're just starting to talk. It was one of those things where and I'm sitting in the meantime, I was staring at my car where she can't see it. But, you know, it's critical what you do and how you do it. I had another question. So we talk about interviewing to our best of our ability to get to the truth. In this case, a lot of times it is somewhat accusatory. It's investigative, but maybe we have other evidence,

and you're talking to a suspect. But what about law enforcement and retailers? Do they use and leverage these more and more sophisticated techniques but what about law enforcement and retailers who are, do they use and leverage these more and more sophisticated techniques in interviewing witnesses? What does that look like more? Yeah, I think, I think that's a good point. It's funny as you, just to go back for a second, as you're talking about the tapes and the cassettes and I just glanced over at my wall here, I've kind of got the,

a little bit of a WZ museum on my, on my wall. and I've got some cassette tapes, an old LaserDisc VHS tape. And it's kind of neat to see from 1982 to now, yeah, I think one thing in the last few years, thankfully, that's become a much more explored topic by interviewers is the same strategy that you might use to sit down with a suspect that you have direct evidence who's committed a crime of some sort is not the same interview structure you should be using on a witness

or a complainant of a case. And, you know, for example, there's a couple of great documentaries out there, Unbelievable, which discusses a serial rapist and really highlights the story of rape victims and how they were disbelieved by investigators because they used inappropriate interview methods, made assumptions, had biases, and instead of going after information, were really trying to go after a confession. And so one of the methods that we focus on for witness interviews is either the cognitive interview, the participatory method, or a trauma-informed interview, where for a high-level

overview is basically letting the subject, maybe the witness in this case, let them tell the story versus the interviewer. And I think one of the most common issues interviewers have, just like me, is being able to shut up and listen. I think we do a really good job of talking and sometimes need to do a better job of asking an open-ended question and letting somebody tell their story. Well, I think it's not listening can be a problem in research when we interview people that are telling us, I am an offender, and then we start talking about what that means. But that's something that we have to learn and make sure that we're constantly checking ourselves to as you say let's you know sit down shut up and listen so critical so that so I think that's interesting maybe can you just give a you know a minute description maybe a little more Dave I

thought it was the the three different techniques that you talked about when you, when we're talking about interviewing, particularly in this case, witnesses or complainants. Yeah. So I think I mentioned the cognitive, the participatory and trauma informed interviewing. The participatory method is one the easiest way for me to describe it, I guess, is for anybody that's listening, that has seen the movie, a few good men. And you think about the, the famous cross-examination

scene of you can't handle the truth, that strategy where you have evidence and you're trying to remove any explanations or excuses for that evidence. So it could be an alibi. It could be, for example, an employee sent an inappropriate maybe message from their computer, their laptop, but potentially they're innocent because somebody else message from their computer, their laptop, but potentially they're innocent because somebody else got on their computer and sent that message on their behalf. So the interview is designed to eliminate those exceptions. But more typically for a victim or a complainant or a witness where you're just trying to trigger their memory, allow them to tell their story.

The cognitive interview is a structured interview approach developed by Dr. Fisher and Dr. Geiselman that has proven to increase somebody's memory recollection. I believe it's between 35 to 50% of an incident without altering the accuracy of that information, which is one of the things that we fall into as interviewers. You might ask a leading question. For example, was that car going fast when it went through the red light? And when you ask a question leading like that, and I insert words like fast, the witness's memory may now be contaminated and they kind of remember the car going fast, whatever fast is defined by in their memory. And then the other interview that I mentioned was trauma-informed interviewing, which might sound like the most complicated interview. And to me, it's actually the most simple. And it's really about the complainant themselves telling about their experience

without really a structure to the interview. Because when you experience trauma, whether you're a victim of a crime, maybe you've witnessed a crime, maybe even in our retail setting, workplace violence or a customer came in and a shoplifter boosted the store or anything that was traumatic to an employee, their memory is scattered. They don't remember things in a linear fashion. So instead of asking, tell me from start to finish what happened, it's more about tell me about the experience, you know, tell me about what you remember the most and allowing the subject to put themselves back in that scene and start to draw out the memory as it comes to them versus the interviewer leading them down that path. So those are really the three different strategies for those cases that would

probably be relative to the subject and then the level of evidence that you would have. Great feedback. I was going to ask Dave, another situation. Mostly we're talking about a past event, ex post facto. Something's happened. We're trying to understand it. What happened? Who was involved? How extensive? Things like that. Maybe we're even trying to ask questions around what can we do to get better? That's the main area where we come in with our research, for instance. But what about an imminent event?

And of course, terrorism pops to mind, the clock's ticking, this person sitting in front of me, we strongly believe, knows what's gonna happen and where and when. So any thoughts on that? I don't know if we want to go too controversial here, but I mean, it's just the clock's ticking, life is at stake versus we're really trying to understand and put things right. I think it's a great question. I think the first thing that pops to my head right? I think it's a great question. And I think the first thing that pops to my head is still stick to the science. And what we've seen in a great book for people that I recommend

is called Unjustifiable Means. And it was written by Mark Fallon, who's a former NCIS special agent. And he played an integral role in, or courageous role really, himself and Colonel Stephen Kleinman and others to try to remove these enhanced interrogation techniques, also known as torture, in these types of settings. And so back to your question, when you say, you know, the threat is imminent, how do we get the truth out of somebody or maybe prevent something major disastrous from happening? major disastrous from happening, what happens is an interviewer feels this urgent need to get to the truth, and rightly so, because they want to try to protect the loss of life. Unfortunately, what happens is when we are in that state, people are resorting to techniques and measures that are only producing false information and increasing resistance. Or if you look at what we did from a torture, now we as in WZ, we as in the United States did from a torture standpoint, they went after this strategy called learned helplessness, which is pretty disgusting in my personal opinion,

some inappropriate measures to try to get to the truth. And what they found is using those types of techniques actually resulted in either no new information or false and misleading information, which then, as you can imagine, only makes your situation worse. So I think the easiest answer to a question like that is still stick to the science, understand what I do or say in that room that will cause increased resistance from somebody. The information they have might seem more important or high risk to us as the interviewer, but we still need to understand what is the reason this person doesn't want to talk to me? What are some of the things I can do to give them the opportunity to talk and save face? And then lastly, I think a confession should not be the goal of an interview.

And even not just from an ethical standpoint, but strategically in these cases, I'm not necessarily looking for an I did it or a name. If there's any information, actionable, reliable information that we can get that we can then act on, that could have the same, if not a better effect than trying to go after a confession. So I think it's really identify the goal of that conversation. What do we need to find out here? And then how can we go investigate it further versus resorting to maybe what might seem like a quicker resolution? Yeah, really interesting. And what you know, what springs to mind,

of course, in the case of, say, terrorism or enhanced techniques, as they're described, is you stick with the science. The science is a little difficult if we, you know, we couldn't, for instance, conduct a randomized controlled experiment or trial. You can imagine because no institutional review board or IRB, IRB2 here, human subjects research would allow us to do that. But I thought that another part of it is that's interesting is I know like with our team, it's really the opposite in that we are trying to get to the truth, but we're telling them part of the truth that we do not want to hear is you doing something at a specific place and time. You can tell us about an event, but we don't want you to tell us where it

was or when it was. We want to know if somebody was with you, but we do not want to know who was with you and things like that. Because we can't. Any research, as you know, cannot result. It has to be consensual based on it's informed and it's consensual and cannot result in the subject or participant's harm. But it's a unique – before, I was on the other side of the table. Now, for the last 25 years, being on the researcher's side, we're like, no, I don't want to hear about this. Now, if something imminent came up, we can get exemptions and say, hey, guess what? This is a murder for hire and this is getting ready to happen or something serious like that.

Right. And I do think from a research standpoint, now there's at least a lot of data out there on the lack of results that were had from the methods that were used at a minimum. And I do know, you know, we've, without getting into too much detail, we've partnered with some different companies that are leveraging some incredible technology to help identify things, not necessarily deception, but to identify if memories are present or not present in a subject relative to some of these sensitive interviews. So there's some neat stuff out there that the academic community partnering with practitioners has developed that I think we'll see more and more over the next few years. That's interesting, too. Let me ask you this, Dave.

Have you all ever encountered, do you even train for, but in particular, have you encountered an interviewee, a subject, maybe a target in an investigation, that has prepared for the interview themselves, maybe via Google? Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think that's, that's probably going to happen more and more. I think, you know, back when I was in the field, it was less of preparing for the interview and more of, you know, I've heard how this goes or a friend of mine's been interviewed and they had a

kind of a general knowledge of it. And as, as we've progressed you know, the last few years, even something like going on Reddit or Google or whatever else, and there's a lot of threads out there, just like you've seen with, you know, shoplifting, how to take an ink tag off, and you can look on YouTube. We've seen a lot of those types of, I guess, suggestions or guidelines of how to prepare for an interview. And I think most recently, and there's a student that I've listened to talk about one of their thesis that they're putting together for this year, and it's on the impact of Netflix documentaries on the perception of interviews and interrogations. And what's interesting is now you've got a lot of

subjects of interviews that have seen a lot of these documentaries that highlight improper interview techniques um they could at any time obviously get brought up during the conversation you know you're just using what they used in this documentary or whatever on me so um i think if investigators haven't experienced it yet it's something to be prepared for. But yeah, we talk about that. We also, if you think about it on the same mindset, we train a lot of internal affairs departments for our law enforcement agencies, Office of Inspector General, who does some internal investigations.

So they're interviewing people who've been trained on how to interview. And so we do get a little bit more in-depth on some of those techniques and strategies and what obstacles to be aware of in those situations. Well, another question along those lines, and again, we all have faulty memories or very selective memories. I think it's the way we're wired since different bits of a memory are stored in different areas. But I believe I recall a WZ executive many years ago telling me they were in a situation where they had to interview a suspect who was a law enforcement investigator who got in very serious trouble and had been through more than one interview and interrogation training course themselves. So now we're taking the next level.

And my recollection, the person was successful in getting to the bottom of the situation. And in this case, it involved the confession. Any thoughts around that, Dave? A trained interviewer being interviewed. Yeah, I think two different things here. The first is, and anybody hopefully listening to the podcast here are investigated in some capacity. They're investigators or they're solution providers

or they've been on the, I'll say the good side of the law for these types of conversations. And if you ever think about, hey, if I'm ever interviewed, here's how I would respond. And we kind of, I think have this, um, maybe fictitious idea of what that would look like or feel like. But I think if you put yourself in the other perspective where you have done something wrong and the person sitting you down has knowledge of what you did wrong and expresses that to you and gives the opportunity to tell your side of the story, I think it's a different perspective. So when we get that question a lot in the classes, how would you handle interviewing an interviewer? It's one thing to look at it from the outside, but I think once you're in that seat, the fear of being caught

is obviously escalated and the incentive to be able to tell your story is also escalated. So I think that's one piece. And then the second part to that is, you know, even if somebody at WZ, for example, if let's say I did something stupid, right? I went down to University of Gainesville or University of Florida in Gainesville and I'm touring around the campus and I ended up going to a local bar and I did something silly and I get thrown out of the bar. Maybe somebody here, maybe Dave Zalowski has to interview me. He's probably not going to sit down and go through the WZ method and go through the 18 steps. At the end of the day, he's going to want to establish credibility that he knows what happened based off the investigation and then give me the

opportunity to tell my story. And I think as long as those two concepts are delivered, that's going to be your best guide to success in the interview. But ultimately, if you do a thorough investigation, it doesn't matter if the person cooperates or not. You're giving them the chance to provide their side of the story. And you can go either corroborate or disprove whatever they told you to close out your case. And that's, I think, why the technology and the things that you guys are doing at LPRC are so impactful for interviews that if you have a

thorough investigation and substantial evidence, it makes that confession so much less important, which really changes the whole landscape of what we're talking about. Yeah. And even those are my best recollections is, you know, we were thoroughly trained. Dave Whitney, the VP at Ross, was a pretty incredible person. And so when we went to those interviews, I mean, we may have had some props, if you will, but we really didn't go into an interview situation until we said, okay, I know this is the person that did it. I know how they did it. I may want to find out a little more about what else they did or who else they did it with. But no, a great point. What about, you know, let's think about

this, polygraphs. And before we go, when we're doing research now, we have access to a shimmer. We have one for the team that measures GSR, galvanic skin response, emotion, arousal, if you will. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of scientific evidence that that emotive response correlates with others or helps you validate. You would never go just on that. But if they're looking and using our eye trackers and they're spending more time here than there, they're telling us this and their emotion, we see a spike at the same time. These things are happening at the same time. You've got your question, and then you see these responses. In this case, we're saying, hey, which option would you be more likely to notice or recognize or respond to?

Of course, seek and fear. But what are your thoughts on technology and interviewing? I think any technology that can support, obviously, getting to the truth is worth exploring. I think as long as it's used, you had a phrase there, and I forget exactly how you said-all, be-all. And I think a lot of the technology that's grown from the polygraph and really getting away from deception detection, but there's some technology out there that measures the dilation of pupils and where your eye, your gaze aversion,

and there's some other technology I mentioned earlier that's looking more for whether memory is present or not. Any of this technology, the risk, in my opinion, that exists is if an investigator, and it's hard to mitigate, but if an investigator develops a bias because somebody triggered or failed some type of test that was, you know, whether it was technology or an interview test, is using that as a guide of maybe where to explore further, but not as a determination of truth versus deception or innocence versus guilt.

And I think a very simple example of that is looking at a victim of maybe a sexual assault or a sexual harassment case. And I mentioned the documentary earlier, or the film on Netflix, Unbelievable. There's also a book for those that like to want to read it instead. The book is titled A False Report, A True Story of Rape in America.

And the victim is asked questions like, what do you think should happen to the accused? And it's kind of gone through this test. The victim fails the test, the victim fails the test essentially, which creates a bias in the investigator's head that the victim must be lying. Not recognizing that instead of looking for truth and deception, there's other reasons people might display anxiety or fear unrelated to being deceptive or guilty. So the long answer to your question or the short answer, I guess, is, uh, technology is a great tool as long as it's used appropriately and doesn't create further

biases in the investigation. Yeah. And we use, I mean, the term really is triangulation, right? We're triangulating, uh, in this case, we're also in a, or maybe an easier place because we're trying to understand what stimuli might get a response that we're looking for. Wow, I see that camera or I don't see the camera. I recognize that camera or I don't or I misrecognize that. And then finally, I respond to that. I understand why that's there. And I feel like there's no risk to me. Nobody's watching or assist. Or no, that puts, I feel at risk that I might get caught stealing. So I'm not, I'm deterred. So yeah. So we're going to triangulate

what they're saying, what their eyes are telling us. Do they really look, do they look at that compared to other things? And then finally, what's the arousal level with GSR readings? And do those all correlate with each other, you know, stimulus? And then there you go. The response from all three measures are, you know, directionally similar. But we're also going to combine their responses with 40 to 400 other people's responses. Yeah. So, and the outcome is safety, but it's not risk to them. Yeah. Right. And I think that's important as being, as you know, obviously in science is being able to replicate is important. And, um, some of the, the technology that's out there in the interview world,

there's, there's a human element to it, which adds a variable that makes, makes it difficult. So, I mean, there's polygraphers out there, you know, the top percentage that use it in a very efficient way that helps investigators, you know, determine what areas to explore further or not. But again, there's a risk to it being used the wrong way. One of the tools, not from a technology standpoint, but from, as we're talking about kind of deception detection, is an approach called the verifiable fact approach, where you're really looking at how much, how many verifiable details is a subject providing for you after a

series of instructions. And so there's a ton of research for people that are out there like yourself that have those keywords you're always looking for. Looking at any type of deception detection, there's a lot of research debunking some of the things that people grew up on, on how to tell, how to catch a liar, but also some more interesting ways on how to increase somebody's cognitive load, how to have a greater disparity between truth and deception, and how to explore that the most appropriate way. Very good. And, you know, just a really good insight. What about, now let's switch gears here. Here we are in the middle of a crisis. I'm hoping that a lot of the discussion that you and I have just been having, Dave, is timeless, for lack of a better word. But now let's focus in on this place and time during this pandemic.

And I'm not sure, but my perception is that you all certainly perfected, if not rolled out, these remote interviews, but also the systematic way that they're done. So that's obviously very practical because we all know a regional or a district person may be covering stores across multiple states. And that's right now, nobody's traveling a whole lot. But back then it was even difficult to cover that.

So, hey, let's be efficient. Let's collect evidence via POS and other data, do remote interviews. And then now we'll do a remote investigative interview with who we believe is the suspect. Tell us a little bit about that. We don't want to go into your course content, of course. But what's that look like? And it's got to be more critical and important now than ever.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's a great point to talk about. We do have a ton of free resources out there too. So if we don't cover it here, but we've got several video tips and I just pushed out an article, Wayne Hoover and I, maybe two or three weeks ago that goes really detailed into some of these tips. So if people need more information, I can also share with you guys so you have it. But I think, first of all, because of the situation we're in, so ignoring just the fact that it's a remote interview, but the priority is the mental wellness of our teams, not only our interviewers, but the subjects and the witnesses we're interviewing, is having increased empathy,

more awareness of the day-to-day situation and the emotional stability of who you're talking to, making sure we're spending more time developing rapport in a remote interview, especially in a situation like this than you might in a face-to-face interview. And really being a human first and an investigator second, I think, is just some of the key things as we're kind of struggling through this unique situation together. But overall, I mean, there's a lot of things to talk about when you think about remote interviewing. For me, the most difficult part is the logistics of, you know, if I have somebody that wrote me a statement, for example, how do I secure and preserve that new evidence? Who am I relying on as a partner in the field that's managing those logistics? If I'm talking to an

employee who may end up maybe terminated or even prosecuted at the end of this conversation, again, who can I rely on as a partner in the local field to communicate with law enforcement or to handle the disposition of the case? So some of those things, you know, the room setup, the making sure everybody feels safe during the conversation. I think the remote interview is going to put a little bit more responsibility on the preparation piece of the entire process to make sure all those T's are crossed and those I's are dotted. A couple other takeaways. I know from an investigation standpoint, we're relying a lot more right now on, which is great, a lot of technology out there from exception reporting systems to surveillance video to anonymous tips or hotline calls from our stores. stores. And as an investigator, typically in a face-to-face, when you're able to go visit a location and go look at the video yourself, if you have to go into a store or go talk to witnesses,

you have a more thorough investigation. And sometimes these remote interviews are being done a little more reactively without as much time being invested in the investigation. So it's very easy to pick up the phone and have a bias because your store manager swears they saw the employee put cash in their pocket and you didn't double check. And so I think having that checks and balances in your head that just because this is over the phone doesn't mean I'm going to take any shortcuts. So still doing a thorough investigation. So there's a lot of logistics, I think, to go into that, the remote interview, keeping people engaged on the conversation. I mean, right now, I think I'm having Zoom fatigue myself. I've been on so many video calls the last few weeks. So it's easy to kind of drift off as

the listener. So making sure as the interviewer, you know, these are not monologues, that we're turning these into more of a dialogue and using engagement techniques and keeping the subject involved in the conversation is obviously important as well for these types of interviews. That's great. Now, can you tell me a little bit, Dave, about the CFI program? What is that? How does that work? How do people get involved in it? Yeah, so most, well, all of the information is on the website certifiedinterviewer.com. The CFI designation is really for people who are passionate about interviewing or interrogation within their career field. And it could be, a lot of people have a misconception that it's only for the loss prevention folks,

but we've got CFIs ranging from human resources, loss prevention, audit, compliance, security, law enforcement, military, and some of our government agencies. And the CFI was designed to create a standard out there and a measurement of knowledge of interview and interrogation. A lot of people that go through the WZ class, they walk out with a certificate and they feel like they're certified. And the WZ program, at least the level one program, you know, provides skills or at least knowledge for the skills to go out and conduct a couple of different interview methods. But the CFI is a exam that will test people on a comprehensive knowledge set of interviews well outside the

scope of just WZ. So we're talking about case laws that might impact a patrol officer conducting an interview or a loss prevention person in a retail store. Behavioral interviewing, candidate interviewing, multiple different techniques are in the CFI. And then one of the other benefits of the CFI, just like any certification, is there's a commitment to continued education credits to maintain your designation. And I think what's important there for any of the designations out there in any field is when you have these mandates of CEUs, it forces the person who's earned that designation to stay current and stay fresh and to continue to be elite in their field of whatever it could be, in this case, interview and interrogation. So for people that are actually interested in the CFI,

there is an exam you have to take. The best way to prepare for that is we're offering a few different options. You could take an online course, which is kind of a self-paced program to prepare for the exam. The other option is we typically would host a two-day class where you could travel to a local city and you have one of our instructors kind of walk you through a prep. But in our current climate, we're now offering that virtually. So I know Wayne Hoover has done one a couple weeks ago. He's got another one coming up where he's actually hosting a two-day preparation class via Zoom for the CFI exam, which is pretty neat. So definitely a designation that's worth pursuing for anybody that wants to demonstrate and have credentials to show their elite in that specific

field. What are some other courses that WZ offers, Dave, in addition to the CFI prep course? And how do you get a hold of you all? Yeah, so simplest thing, because Wickman or Zalowski is too difficult to spell. We'll keep it simple. So our website is just w-hyphen w-z.com. And right now on there, because we understand, you know, especially our retail partners are, we've got, you know, a large group of listeners out there that are still at work and working in some stressful situations. And we appreciate them being out there. And then we've got another group that is dealing with the struggling economy and furloughs. And so we wanted to try to do what was best for all of our clients. So one thing that we've done is tried to move as much as possible into a remote distance learning environment. So

we've got a series of webinar topics, for example, that we've created new ones on rapport, conflict resolution and de-escalation, false confessions, the cognitive interview we mentioned earlier, telephone interviewing, which we've talked about. So all of these are available remotely through a WebEx, through Zoom. We've also got our regular level one in our advanced class

that people have been coming to for decades is even more new and improved that we're now hosting completely remotely. I've hosted a few of those already. I've got another class tomorrow. And then as we start to get back into hopefully normal business, our HR partners,

a class that's probably been one of our most on-demand programs the last few years is a class designed for those witness interviews uh the accused person of sexual harassment or workplace violence some of the outside of the box cases that either lp is getting tapped into or our hr partners rely on that training and then the last thing i'll mention from a course offering that i think is especially relevant in this situation is a program we launched about two years ago called The Link. And it's actually a simulated

interview program. Rita, I'm sure when you first learned how to interview, you probably went to a course and then you were told, all right, good luck, go out and talk to somebody and we'll see how it goes. And what we've done is to try to mitigate that risk and make people feel more confident with their skills is actually created a, in partnership with a technology company, Submersion, created a product that you can actually interview a subject on the computer based off of what you say. There's a logic tree built behind it. So he might respond differently to you and you get immediate feedback and you can practice the method over and over again. So really some cool stuff. Hopefully a lot to offer for people out there. I know right now for any of our distance learning options, we're also giving away a free year membership to the International Association of Interviewers during this time just to give people more

education while they're maybe stuck at home. So everything's on the website or they can always reach out to me directly. That sounds good. And I think one last thing, take a minute if you would, Dave, and tell us about TalkLP, the podcast. Yeah. So TalkLP, which can be found easily on talklp.com. On Twitter, it's at Let's Talk LP. And I think, Reed, I appreciate us doing this together. What LPRC and the crime science podcast, uh, provide some incredible content. I know I mentioned earlier, I've been on here now, now a couple of times, um, talk LP, we've kind of just taken more of a, um, I guess a lighthearted, uh, approach and we've had some guests on, uh, several, you know, high, high ranking

partners at some different organizations just to kind of give a lot of their career background. You know, recently we had Steven Antoine from Yum Brands. We've had David Johnston from, from Duncan, Carrie Jones. We've had a lot of people in the industry that are ready and excited to share kind of their story of how they grew up in the LP world and maybe some leadership advice out there. So I think, you know, TalkLP and what you guys are doing with crime science, I think the two together really provide a wide scope of information and knowledge base for the industry out there. So I think we'll obviously share this as well to promote both brands. And we're excited

to have a partnership like this of having some more of these podcasts we can do together. I love it. And I guarantee there are quite a few good topics that are going to lend themselves to that. And I appreciate you coming into Gainesville the other day right before this thing hit, fortunately. But we look forward to working further. We're excited that WZ and your team, you all, the team there, are members of the LPRC community. We're looking forward to that. And to you and your loved ones and the team and all the professionals that you and I know out there, stay safe. And thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks, Dave. Absolutely. Thanks, Reid. So from Gainesville, Florida, thank you, everybody, for listening to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast with Dave Thompson from WZ. And thank you, as always, to Kevin Tran, our very busy producer. Again, everybody, stay safe. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.