LPRC - Episode 8 – Investigations & Interrogations

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

The post Episode 8 – Investigations & Interrogations appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome back to Crime Science, the podcast made possible by the Loss Prevention Research Council. In this podcast, we explore helpful topics about preventing crime and loss, the science behind these efforts, and we'll hear real-world examples from loss prevention and asset protection practitioners and other industry professionals as well. On today's episode, we have Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council, Tom Meehan of ControlTech, and our special guest is Dave Thompson of Wicklander Zalowski, and they will be discussing interrogations, investigations, false confessions, and much more. Welcome everybody to the latest edition of the Crime Science Podcast from the Loss Prevention Research Council.

And I wanted to introduce today my co-host, of course, Tom Meehan, longtime LPAP practitioner and also at Control Tech as the CSO. And then joining us today will be Dave Thompson, CFI, Vice President of Operations for the well-respected and well-renowned Wickland-Zaloski, or WZ. What I thought I'd do, if I might, is go over here to Tom. But again, what we like to do, of course, because we know that we do have a variety of listeners, and we do appreciate hearing from you all and understand this is a growing audience, and we look forward to your comments to help us get better topics or other topics. How do we deliver the product, if you will? What's the most usable format, timing, and so forth? But what we're going to do today is talk about investigations. And

as you know, probably 90% of what we do at the Laws Prevention Research Council and my team at the University of Florida is work on preventing crime events, preventing the initiation of a crime prevent or at least successful progression of that event. So we try to deter and disrupt, in some cases, detain the offenders or crews in doing that. But there's no way that any of us can be successful the same as our medical colleagues, unfortunately, in preventing pathologies or injury. And so we need to do investigations to understand what's happened, why it's happened, how it's happened, who all's involved, how long it's been going on, to understand what we're up against, what evidence we need to collect. So interviews can be both an intelligence tool,

as well as an investigative and even accusatory tool to see if we can't add to our evidence base by direct admission, if you will. So with all that introduction, I'll go over to Tom Meehan. Tom? Thanks, Reed. Thanks, everybody, for joining us via the podcast. This is our eighth episode, and we're very excited to have everybody on, listening. Welcome, Dave. Dave Thompson is the Vice President of Operations for Wicklander Zalowski. And Dave, our retail audience is very aware of what Wicklander Zalowski is, but what we're finding is our podcast listeners spread a broad scope of things from the public sector, law enforcement, district attorneys, academia, and folks that really aren't exposed to Wicklander Zalowski. So can you just give a brief overview of what Wicklander Zalowski does, who the group is,

and for the listeners that have never heard about it, what they would need to know about you guys? Sure. And I think that's really exciting to see the outreach that your podcast has been having recently. I've been a fan myself with listening to some of your recent podcasts. That's really exciting. Wickman and Zalowski has been around since 1982. And really, we're known for our non-confrontational interview training. So we train about 450 seminars a year across the globe from anything in the private sector, whether it's human resources or loss prevention and security agencies, through state, local law enforcement and federal agencies, Department of Defense across the globe. And really what we focus on are different methodologies on how you can use the truth to your advantage and what are ways in a non-confrontational manner

to talk to an employee, a suspect, a witness, a victim, and allow them to tell you the truth to uncover more about your investigation while also mitigating the risk and minimizing liability of doing it the wrong way. Great. Thank you. Can you tell listeners a little bit about your role at WZ? Sure. At WZ, I manage really the day-to-day operations, and most importantly to me is continuing to look for innovative ways to distribute our training and how to update the content and innovate what we teach. communicated, you know, 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Just the way the communication changes, the way the law changes, and really what research has shown us on what's a more productive, more efficient way to get the truth while mitigating risk. So a lot of what I've been involved in with WZ over the last couple of years is really looking at our content and making sure

that we are consistent with research, consistent with academia, but still providing investigators with a tool to identify the truth. And then other than that, I'm also an instructor. So probably spend about 80% of my time on the road, getting to interact with attendees across the board from the private sector and the public sector, teaching concepts of interview and interrogation. Dave and I are both colleagues and friends and I will say I've had the pleasure of seeing Dave speak on many different occasions. So if you haven't had a chance, there's plenty of stuff online, video as well as audio. It's a real treat and a learning experience to see Dave speak. So today we're going to talk about interview, interrogation, investigations,

but I think one of the things I'd like to focus on is really what are, you know, false confessions, what are the causes of them, and the impact that false confessions can have on retail loss prevention. You know, Dave, what are some of the common causes of false confessions? Yeah, you know, when we talk about false confessions, a lot of people focus on a homicide case or a rape case or some of these the more serious offenses out there and we tend to forget that these same causes and missteps in an interview and interrogation can apply to the private sector. Things like the length of time of an interview or an

interrogation. We've seen a high percentage of false confessions result from interrogations that last three hours or longer. If you're in the room for that long trying to get the truth out of somebody, trying to get information, something more than likely has gone sideways. So length of time has been one of the key indicators. Suggestions of leniency. And what I mean by that is what we see often in an interview it could be an explicit promise right something that we hear where the interviewer says you know if you tell us the truth you're going to be okay if you tell us the truth you know we can we can make a deal and we see that less and less what we

see more of our implicit promises or suggestions of leniency where the interviewer might say something like I hope you and I can solve this in the room today or if you can tell me the truth that's good enough for me and essentially suggesting to the subject of the interview that hey if you tell me what I want to hear I'm removing any kind of consequence by removing a consequence that really removes the fear from an innocent person to also also. And then the other thing that we see that's really common is lying during an interview. You know, the Supreme Court allows lies. Frazier v. Cupp allows for investigators to lie during the interrogation.

But just because you're allowed to do it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do. I think it's a little bit contradictory when we have to lie in order to get to the truth. But what we see often in false confession cases is the investigator directly lies about the evidence. Say, we have your DNA on the victim, or we have your fingerprints on the gun, or we absolutely have video of you taking the money from the register. And when none of that exists, but somebody keeps being told over and over again that that happened it starts to convince somebody that hey maybe I did do it or if I'm not going to get in trouble anyways maybe I'll just tell them I did it so I can get the heck out of the room and and really what we look at from causes of false confessions if it's really just one of these things it's the

totality of an interview and you start to hear these things over and over again and and they can happen anybody I think a lot of times people feel like the It's the totality of an interview. And you start to hear these things over and over again. And it can happen to anybody, I think. A lot of times people feel like the false confession is only going to be, you know, a victim of somebody who is a juvenile, somebody who has any kind of, you know, mental capability issues, somebody who's under the influence. But really, anybody could be the victim of a false confession when put under those circumstances. You know, I wanted to, that's good stuff, Dave. And, you know, we're all about getting at the truth. That's what an investigation is. We're trying to protect people. We're trying to protect

places and property. And so that's the role of an investigator is to try and understand, as you were talking about, you know, what really happened here and how do I find out what happened, why it happened, how it happened, as well as then I'll collect evidence that might hold up in a proceeding if needed. And so I think part of what I want to ask about was, you know, there is reality out there, and it's sort of like introducing ourselves to reality all the time. And so, you know, I've had the opportunity to live in a couple different worlds. One is a practitioner in loss prevention for several years as a practitioner in law enforcement. And then, of course, as a scientist for the last, you know, couple of decades. So,

you know, I've tried to mesh those two worlds in that what you learn as you become a research scientist is that science is the world and should represent at least our empirical observation of what's going on. It's not supposed to be just hypothetical or theoretical or not, you know, unrealistic, in other words, or silly. And so everything that we try and do in research is to understand how do things work, why do they work that way, and then if there's something in there that we can do to prevent it if it's something we don't want to happen, what does that look like and how does that operate? What are the mechanisms there? But what I was going to say is in the real world that the practitioners that you deal with every day in law enforcement, in loss prevention, and elsewhere, they're in the real world. They want to get better,

I'm sure, or they wouldn't be working with you. And you're always trying to get better at your craft, it sounds like. But there are a lot of people working in these buildings that are coming to these buildings and spaces and places that are dishonest, whether they thought about it right then or they thought about it before they got there. And so we've got a lot, a lot of crime and loss. And you all know the latest University of Florida and NRF study came out. They still estimate we're looking at well over $40 billion in losses. And we all know that from our data and others that armed robbery attempts and other violent crimes have continued to rise over the last two years. And so there's a lot to investigate. In fact, it could almost be a crushing amount of crime to investigate and loss.

And so one thing that I've been impressed and I wanted to ask you about with this long setup here is the real world. You've got investigators, and some of these investigators may cover five stores, 10 stores, or 500, or even 1,000 locations. And so your process, as you continue to help them get better, is designed, it sounds like, to make their investigations more accurate, but much quicker. They don't have the luxury, if they've got two or 300 cases that have been generated in the last 90 days to take care of, to spend weeks or months or years on them. And so over-the-phone interviews or more efficient and effective interviews in person. Can you tell us a little bit about what you all are trying to do and what that what that looks like. Yeah, Reed, and I think actually to your first point, I just want to say how important it is, you know, you have the ability from a practitioner and a researcher perspective in one person. And what we've really tried to do over the last few years is focus on that collaboration between, you know, practitioners

and the real, real world of what we have to get out there and get tasks to do as well as academia and it's been really an interesting and humbling experience to work with the academic side and educating them on what practitioners need to be able to do but then in turn educating the practitioners on what the research says so really getting both both sides to work together to still provide a solution so I think it's really neat what LPRC does to kind of do that for the retail world and what we've been trying to do. So that's the first point. But to your second, your main question is, what do we do to help provide that tool to practitioners? So WZ really prides itself on a non-confrontational approach.

And I mentioned earlier that time is one of the leading issues or contributing factors, I'll say, to false confessions. And what we've seen with the WZ method in crimes against property is we're typically making an accusation or obtaining an admission or a confession between 15 and 45 minutes for those types of cases. And that's when you have some evidence

and you have some evidence and you have a single suspect. But we've also been training, you mentioned phone interviewing, and we've also trained a method called the participatory method, which is a way what's more fact gathering when you don't have all of the information

and your goal is not a confession, your goal is to get information. And so what's really neat about the methods that we teach is they're very flexible to each one of the practitioners, you know, businesses that they have to deal with, whether it's a human resources case, employee relations investigation, it's, you know, embezzlement or white collar crime, or it's something direct merchandise or cash left out of the store, is all very flexible and able to be executed, whether it's over

the phone or in person in a short timeframe with minimal resistance from a subject and minimal liability because it's done in a non-confrontational rapport-based conversation. Fantastic. And that's a great response. And I appreciate that, Dave, that there's always this underpinning. You're always evolving and helping your students in this way. Can you give us an example of how your techniques and what you're learning and helping them, how can you help make the practitioners a little more efficient and effective out there, whether it be over the phone or in-person interviews? I think one thing that we tend to skip or shortcut, especially experienced interviewers, is the prep time, the strategy that goes into a conversation.

And Reed, you mentioned that some of our practitioners, they're dealing with a heavy caseload, multiple locations, maybe covering half the country depending on the type of retailer they're working for. And so what happens over time is an interview becomes just another task on your calendar. And we tend to shortcut the preparation, and that can be more dangerous. that can be more dangerous. So really not just discussing in our seminars the method and the applicability of it, but the importance of the strategy and the preparation before to determine what evidence do I have, what potential excuses or explanations could there be for that evidence, is there a chance my evidence is wrong, what could the subject of my interview say that contradicts the evidence,

and really talking to our students and people who attend our class about how to be prepared for that and how to avoid confirmation bias in that interview that we're just looking for somebody to agree with what we think our evidence says. Instead, we're really looking for the truth. So I spend a lot of time on that in the classes. How do you prepare? How do you strategize? Which makes the rest of the process that much more simple.

Really great stuff, Dave. And I'm going to put a couple more questions about false confessions. And then I want to kind of get back to the general topic of interview and interrogation. But I think there's a lot of media around false confessions today. And over the last three to five years, I see a lot more of it, especially with DNA getting better and better. All of these things are coming out in the open. And most of the false convictions that you hear about and the wrongful convictions are really in the public sector around homicide and rape. How does that impact the private sector, in your opinion? How does it impact the private sector, both in retail, off-the-bred, and outside?

How does it impact the private sector both in retail loss prevention and outside? Yeah, Tom, I think it's not only a really good question, but something that anybody that conducts an interview needs to pay attention to, whether it's a practitioner's task to talk to somebody who stole $5 out of a cash register or talk to a homicide suspect. All of these interviews are high liability, high risk conversations. And I think we see it more often in the public sector because, like you mentioned, of the DNA evidence, because typically those crimes result in long sentences or potentially even somebody sentenced to life or the death penalty. And you're really, really messing around and sacrificing somebody's life with a wrong decision. And when you translate that to the private sector, we have to think about the same things could happen. We could have an employee who is suspected of stealing a few hundred dollars and maybe the admission turns into $5,000. And the question is, we get excited after the interview because we got this large confession,

but did we really go back and make sure we were missing $5,000? Did we make sure and substantiate that that person took that $5,000? The gap that we have in the private sector is there may not be as much of due diligence. Some of these associates or employees may not be getting prosecuted. Maybe they're not going through due process, and really there's not a lot of scrutiny to the investigation. And if you think about the consequences and the damage on the private sector side from an improper interview or investigation, not only the human element of what happens to the subject of that interview, also the liability to the company financially, the brand damage

to a company that wrongfully terminates somebody or publishes that somebody was admitted to theft or a crime they actually didn't do. There's a variety of consequences that can come in the private sector as well. And both sides of the fence, imagine being somebody who didn't do anything wrong and now dealing with a reputation and the consequences of somebody who allegedly did because an interview went the wrong way. So the consequences are different, but could have the same longstanding effect. So I did my first formal interview training, I think in 1999. And over the years have taken many, many Wicklander classes in all different sectors from, you know, the non-confrontational to the HR to, you know, some more advanced classes, as well as I've had

the opportunity to take other, other methods and really throughout my career, every where I've worked, it was always the Wicklander method, regardless of how many steps over the years, always the Wicklander method, regardless of how many steps over the years it's progressed and changed. But I can recall vividly in, you know, in my earlier stages of the career, really focusing heavily on behaviors. You know, I can remember in 2002, thinking that I was a body language expert and could help someone with lying by talking to them right away. And, you know, now, 20 years later, thousands of interviews later, you know, I understand that behavior is a part of it, but you're an expert in the field of interview and interrogation. You know, how does behavioral interpretation play a role in the problem? Tom, I think it's a key part of the problem. And I think, you know,

Reid mentioned it earlier, is really going from a practitioner standpoint and now kind of absorbing what the academia is showing and what the research is saying and so we we still discuss behavior in the class today however the way the behaviors discussed is more about the dangers of misclassifying behavior, the danger of identifying behavior as truthful or deceptive. And we spend more time talking about how, you know, if somebody's behavior changes in front of you and, you know, the speed of their response changes and they avoid making eye contact and they, you know, they itch their beard, doesn't need to be defined and shouldn't be defined as guilty. You know, what you could see is you could be talking to the victim of a sexual assault, the witness to that

sexual assault, and the suspect who committed the sexual assault. And all three subjects in your interview might show you the same behavior. And if you classify them all as deceptive, you have a real problem. It's really what you're seeing is maybe concern, maybe anxiety, or maybe somebody just has an itchy beard and they're uncomfortable with the interviewer. And so what we spend a lot of time now on in the class is understanding that, you know, different people are going to exhibit different types of behavior, but classifying it as truthful or deceptive can really lead to confirmation bias and lead an investigator to assuming guilt based off of something that's really, really not accurate. A lot of the research shows that, you know,

identifying truth from deception based on physical behavior alone, the accuracy rate is about 54%, which is not good. You might as well flip a quarter and see if you're just as good. So focusing more on the dangers of classifying behavior and more focus on the class in how do you gather information? How do you identify facts? How do you distinguish between a gut feeling and an actual material fact of the case by getting information from the right types of questions? So as a practitioner in either the private or the public sector, what are some proactive solutions to mitigate the risk there?

And then secondly, and I'm putting together because I think you'll answer them this way, what types of questions can retail professions ask, or private or public actually, during an interview to help limit the potential of a false confession? So I asked those together because I figured they would probably go together. Sure. I think, yeah, types of questions to be asked. And I'm going to go back from kind of step one is preparation and identifying, okay, what evidence do I have? Are there reasonable explanations to why this evidence could exist?

I think what investigators need to be aware of is that the interview and the investigation, the I did it, is not the end of the investigation, right? It's a piece of the entire package. So making sure you're weighing all the evidence against each other and going in with an open mind. James Traynham, who's a former homicide detective out of Washington, D.C., wrote a great book called How Police Generate False Confessions. And from a practitioner standpoint, he really goes into talking about what I just mentioned is the evidence. And when was that evidence actually disclosed during the investigation? Did the interviewer accidentally slip out and fact feed information? Did the

witness bring it up first? Did they see it in the media? Where did that come out? So number one is preparation. Understand the evidence you have and understanding that your evidence could be wrong. Number two is determining what's the right interview approach to use. Is it using a cognitive interview

where really your entire goal is to just get information? One of the huge benefits of the cognitive interview is it prevents fact feeding or contamination of the confession or the information from the subject because the subject's doing 90% of the talking there. Is it a fact gathering or what we call the participatory method where the really goal there is to withhold the key piece of evidence that you have and allow the subject to either try to explain it away or what we call the participatory method, where the goal there is to withhold the key piece of evidence that you have and allow the subject to either try to explain it away or lock themselves into it

without knowing the evidence that you have. And then lastly, if we're gonna resolve in an accusation on using the WZ method, do we have the evidence that supports that? Have we exhausted all of our investigative needs to make sure that this is the subject that we need to talk to? So having the preparation, identifying the right approach, and when you talk about types of questions, I mean the best question to ever ask in an interview is an open-ended

tell me what happened. If your goal is information, then that's one of the best questions to ask. It prevents fact feeding, it prevents the contamination, and allows the interviewer to get the most amount of information. Also, what I mentioned is withholding information. If you're talking to an associate, for example, who's stolen some money from a company and maybe they've stolen some merchandise, and there's things that you know that they have not stolen, there's things you know that there's no way they could have stolen or committed these types of

crimes. Are you also asking about those things? At some point during an interview you should be getting, you know, truthful denials and say, no I didn't do that. I wasn't involved in that. And if all you're getting is I did it, I did it, I did it, that's a problem. Either you're getting several false confessions or you're not asking enough enough questions to validate or substantiate the admission. And that's the last piece of substantiation. I know I mentioned at the beginning of this this answer here, but we see a lot of interviews end with, yeah I did it, all right can you write me a statement? And

it shouldn't just be I did it, it should be I did it how, when, how many times, who taught me, where is it now, how can I get it back? And this way, an investigator can now investigate the confession and make sure that information they obtained is corroborated and truthful. I don't think today we're going to go heavily into the science, but I can tell you that with our team, of course, and this was the subject of our last podcast, Crime Science Podcast, was interviewing offenders, those that are out there offending in one way or another, to understand how they perceive and process, how they might notice and respond to the environment, to temptation, and to then countermeasures we might array out there. countermeasures we might array out there. But as part of that, and I think maybe this has some relevance here with interviewing suspects, as well as, of course, those on the front end, we're just on a fact-gathering phase. And that is, you know, it's always difficult. What we're

trying to do, just like in any science, again, is measure reality and understand how things relate to each other, or maybe even cause something else. But this is a discussion we had the other day, Dave and myself, at the NRF Protect Conference, and that most of our interviewing is asking offenders to recall something. And so there is a lot of science, a lot in the literature about how do you do that? And you mentioned it early on today on the podcast, Dave, that the farther out in time that we're talking to somebody about something that happened in the past, then the hypothesis, of course, is maybe there's a continuing steady or some sort of cluster decrease in the reality of what they're relating to us now. But the other, so what we try and do

as much as possible is kind of put them into more of an experiencing mode. They're not just kind of trying to remember something, but they're now sort of experiencing, feeling, and so forth, what happened and how and why and so forth. So I don't know if this is relevant to your interviews, Dave, but that's what we're doing more and more. And we have fancy terms around validity. We're always looking at validity. Is this valid? And is it also reliable? If we ask the same thing or somebody else asks the same thing at another time, would we find the same thing? And an example might be real give all 20 a thermometer and 10 of them hold the thermometer with the tips of their fingers, the other 10 hold it in their hand, tightly clasp in their hand, you might argue that the 10 that are doing the latter are measuring their body temperature.

They're not measuring the air. So measurement error is huge here in any scientific endeavor because we're trying to find out reality so we can maybe do something about it. So recalling versus experiencing, Dave, is that relevant with what you all do? Absolutely. And I think in two fronts. I think number one is in the actual interview. And I'm actually going to compare that to what a lot of our LP professionals are getting tasked with now is sexual harassment investigations and employee relations investigations. How do you interview maybe a victim or a witness of an experience that they had, whether it was a week ago or two years ago, and try to get them to discuss with you what happened.

And what's really difficult sometimes for an interviewer is asking questions and not changing the memory or the experience that the person actually had. It could be like a patrol officer responding to a car accident, talking to a victim or talking to a witness and ask the witness, how fast was that car going when it went through the light? And in that simple question, we just suggested the car was going fast. And by saying through the light, we may have suggested they went through a red light, which could in turn change the witness's perspective of what they actually remembered happening. And so doing a cognitive interview, which would be more asking, tell me what happened. And like you mentioned, putting yourself or putting the witness or the victim back in the moment, allowing them to tell

you an untainted version of the story, uninterrupted, taking notes, and then going back through that story, asking more expansion questions and more open-ended questions to allow them to define the details versus the interviewer doing it themselves. And we see that as a big misstep often in an interview where, you know, a subject of an interview witness might say, I saw these two employees and they were getting really aggressive with each other. Well, if I talk to one witness and they said aggressive and I take that fact and I go for that word and I go to another witness and I say, hey, how aggressive were those two employees when you saw them? them well aggressive means something different to different people so to your thermometer example one person felt aggressive man

they must have been yelling they must have been screaming and the other person we said aggressive and they think it must have been hitting each other so really making sure that the interview is set up in a way and the interviewer is aware of who's the one that's providing the information and it should be the subject of the interview and not not us and then the other piece I wanted to kind of add on to is you talked about validity and measurement not just in the interview but from a training standpoint what we've noticed over the last you know several years is that when people go to a two-day program or a three-day class and they leave, if you ask those people a week later to give you the WZ method or to give you any

method of whatever class they might have went to, it's probably going to be slightly inconsistent based on the feedback they've received, based on the mentorship that they have from somebody in the field. So we created a simulated interviewing program about six to eight months ago called the link that allows people after the program to actually practice the method in a risk-free environment on the computer and get consistent feedback as to what did they say that was did they did they use a threat or a promise did they give a implicit promise or suggest leniency did they stick to the 18 steps but this

way the feedback is consistent across the board because you know read just like you mentioned when you get five different people looking at the same thing and they got five different definitions of it can be dangerous and the same thing applies to feedback from mentors after somebody times a training program so the link we're hoping helps kind of satisfy that problem and fill the gap between the knowledge you might get in a class and the applicability of actually using those skills in a real environment. Well, it's interesting. That's good stuff, Dave, where you mentioned earlier really the key is preparation. more evidence through other sources that you've collected online and other witness interviews, maybe looking at documents, paperwork, POS data, video footage, of course, whatever it might be.

And the more you know about that, the more you know about the individual and the situation, the environment that they work in and where this occurred and so forth, you probably can continually validate as you're describing what you're hearing. And again, there may not be perfect recollection, and maybe not even close, but you're seeing a very, very tight correlation with what they might be recalling and describing with what you have from other sources. You've got what we would call convergent validity. You're seeing multiple sources of data sort of helping validate or verify each other,

it sounds like. Dave, you and I actually happened to be at a conference a few months back, and it was heavily law enforcement. So I would say there was probably 150 law enforcement from both local and federal. And after that conference, I got a couple of emails from a few folks about the CFI and a certified forensic interviewer. And the question really was, you know, law enforcement versus private sector, what's the difference for the CFI? So could you give the listeners just a little bit of understanding of the method for non-accusatory for public or private. Is there a difference? What can you tell our law enforcement listeners? Yeah, the CFI, the Certified Forensic Interviewer designation, which is recognized by the International

Association of Interviewers, really has a broad membership between private sector and public sector. And even in the public sector, everything sector everything from state local and even some federal agencies and military the CFI is is something that was created really to provide a standard and a code of ethics and a measurement of people that are knowledgeable and elite in the field of interview and interrogation and that certification covers you know kind of the whole gamut from case law to techniques that may be used by both public and private sector to employee relations to everything that you might use in a homicide case to employee theft

case so really the information that somebody would need to be well versed on and study to prepare for that CFI exam is not going to discriminate between private and public sector. It's going to be, is this somebody who's elite in their knowledge in the field of interview and interrogation? And what we've seen to the benefit of that in the public sector is credibility when it comes to testifying, when it comes to knowledge of different methodologies the risks of using the wrong techniques and really the the case laws that support what they

can or cannot do in an interview so understanding kind of guardrails that they have but to the other point you made Tom the non confrontational approach and whether it's in the private or public sector again the flexibility that approach makes it really powerful I've trained several programs and WZ as a company is you know almost half and half of public and private sector of how can you use the non confrontational method you know for a for a burglary it will say and very simple example in the public sector if if I have a suspect who broke into a vehicle on main and first and I walk in more of a classic interrogation and I say we have

we have an evidence that shows you broke into that Toyota Camry on Main and First last night and I might get a confession about that if I use a non-confrontational approach ideally I'm going to get information about the five other cars they broke into that week, maybe the drugs that they've been involved in, maybe the credit cards they stole out of that car and where they sold those credit cards, and maybe a retailer they've been hitting involved in organized crime ring. Because one of the concepts of non-confrontation is, again, withholding the evidence, not making a direct accusation, not directly lying about any evidence, and really more so allowing the subject of the interview to determine, you know, what do they

feel like they are, what they are caught on. I think a good example is if one of the listeners right now is, you know, listening to the podcast and they look at their phone and they get a text message from their significant other that says, hey, I can't believe what you did. Call me immediately. It's, you know, what happens to somebody? They start thinking, what the heck did I do wrong? What did they find out about? And, you know, a guilty person starts to kind of wonder, what is it? What does this investigation consist of? And often in a non-confrontational approach, it results in getting admissions to things we may not have known about prior that allows us to go substantiate those confessions.

So a huge benefit to the admission amount, minimizes the liability again, because of the way that we're asking questions and developing rapport with our subjects, and really not highlighting some of these issues that we talked about before. So minimizes liability and provides a better opportunity to identify more of the truth than they may have been using before.

Great. I guess earlier on in the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned research and changes in the non-confrontational method over time. Our listening base, and obviously the LPRCC is really about research and academia and back playing so what can you just give the listeners a little bit of an understanding of you know what type of research is done by WZ and how it changes made in over time and I alluded a little earlier I think when I started there were I there were I don't know there might have been six or twelve steps and then it was 16,

then it was 18. So I've seen evolution, but can you give the audience just how does that work? What does the research look like? What's your role play? And I know there's a whole bunch of questions in there, but just an overview of it, because I think part of our audience would really be interested in that. Yeah, I think, and I know Reid mentioned it before, is the importance of kind of what's reality and how can you prove, and not just theoretical, but how can you prove the validity behind something. And I'm all about bringing in people that are smarter than I am. And what I mean by that is working with some academics who really specialize in this field. And in the last few years, I know we work closely

with some representatives out of the Center on Wrongful Conviction of Youth, out of Northwestern University. I've had some conversations with Saul Kasnaud, John Jay. We actually brought him to our Elite Training Day to educate the group of the International Association of Interviewers on some causes of false conf confessions I mentioned James train them before and his experience and getting a false confession and looking at some of the

the research that he's done we've worked with some different chapters of the innocence project and so when you ask about research and I respond with partnerships as I think that's the most important piece is the collaboration I actually brought in one of the representatives from the Center on Wrongful Conviction of Youth to come out to our WZ internal staff meeting earlier this year just to continue to educate our instructors on what they're seeing as common risks and causes of wrongful convictions or false confessions as it applies to juveniles. I've worked with and had an opportunity to meet some incredible students up at John Jay and pay

attention to the research that they're doing. And so what we do, Tom, is when we partner and we have these conversations and we look at the research that they're conducting and we read these publications, is now we determine how can we take the scientific research and apply that and modify the practical use of a method. How do we make sure that some of the issues that they're highlighting are not issues that we're also creating? So, for example, we talked about behavior interpretation, and some of the research that was out there not only talked about how dangerous classifying behavior is truthful or deceptive could be, but the risk of when people go to a training class and they leave feeling like they're human lie detectors, not only are they just as inconsistent in identifying truth from deception, but they're actually more confident in doing so. And so understanding the risks of teaching somebody improperly and what that's going to happen afterwards is we've updated and changed the way our workbooks represent discussing

behavior. Some of the terms in the rationalization piece of the method. We talked about rationalizing how sometimes people do things they wouldn't normally do because of peer pressure or impulse. And again, I mentioned earlier, a lot of the research shows one of the issues with false confessions is when the interviewer removes intent or removes consequences from somebody's actions. And so there's some ongoing research right now determining if I talk to somebody and

suggest they did something because of peer pressure, does that make the subject feel like they're not going to be in trouble for what they did? Does that take away moral responsibility? And listening to that research and partnering with the academia and then modifying our technique and what we're teaching to make sure it's consistent with their studies is really what we've been focused on. So providing again that practitioner solution with the academic support. Great. And recently, and when I say recently, I go the last three to five years, the topic of interrogation and false confessions has really come up quite a bit in the media. What do you think the causes of the increase of attention is? Well, first of all, I think because it's real.

I think a lot of people still doubt the fact that innocent people can confess to something they didn't do. And so number one is understanding that false confessions are real, wrongful convictions are happening, and it's a problem that we're tackling and need to continue to look at. I think number two, you mentioned earlier, DNA evidence becoming, the science is becoming better and better and allowing for folks in the public sector to actually, you know, exonerate people from a crime or use DNA to lock somebody into a crime. And groups like the Innocence Project and some of the groups I mentioned earlier, really focusing on what's wrong, how do we make a change, and people taking

a stand to say, we got to figure out a better way to do this. And so that's kind of been the source of it. And that's really helped blown up the topic. And then if you take it a step further, you know, if you watch TV now, it seems like every other Dateline episode or Netflix documentary or Law & Order somehow twist in a wrongful conviction or a false confession. Really, because again, it's real, it's happening, and we need to make it more of a topic we discuss so we can find a solution. can find a solution. And about two years ago, a little over two years ago now, when Making a Murderer came out, I think is one that really just grabbed the public's attention. People that had no clue about interview and interrogation are now really paying attention to the dangers and the risks and what goes on in those four walls in an interview or an interrogation room. You read my mind on the next one. Without me getting into my

specific opinions, what was Wicklander Zalowski's involvement in the case? Were you involved in the case? What can you tell our listeners about that whole Netflix series? And then I'll do a two-part question after that. How can the listeners learn more about the topic of interview and interrogation and false confessions? From the making murderer perspective, my initial involvement was just like anybody. I started watching one episode on a Saturday morning and ended up killing my whole weekend watching the documentary over about a day and a half, as well as the rest of us here at WZ. As we watched and saw it, at first you you gotta realize it's not just a documentary, it's not just a movie.

These are real people and real lives that were affected. So we discussed it afterwards here at the office and understood that the interrogation that happened specific to Brendan Dassey in that documentary was really not done the way that we would instruct interviewers to conduct a proper fact-gathering conversation with somebody. The evidence was conflicting, the amount of time in the interview, the

lack of parental guidance or an attorney, the implicit promises, the suggestions of leniency, the changing of the story, the fact-feeding of the interview, all the things that we highlighted throughout this podcast, actually, of what not to do, we saw happen over and over again, that conversation. So as we discussed it at the office and had the opportunity to partner with Laura Nyrider and Steve Driesen over at the Center on Wrongful Conviction of Youth is about a year and a half ago our involvement started by co-authoring an amicus brief to the Seventh Circuit of federal court when the case got appealed from the state of Wisconsin up to

federal court. So we got to co-author an amicus brief which really discussed from a practitioner's perspective this is an example of an interrogation of what not to do an example of what can what can go wrong and from there for people that have followed along the case initially the the federal the appellate court ruled in our favor and then it was appealed again to the entire board of judges and that flipped again so as it goes it's sitting in front of the Supreme Court, actually, and we're hoping for a review this week from the Supreme Court of the United States. And we filed another amicus brief with some other law enforcement practitioners and instructors

about two months ago that again highlighted this is an example of what not to do. The Supreme Court needs to review this case and provide some clarity as to how do we handle a juvenile interview or an interrogation with care? How do we take extra precautions to make sure over the totality of the interview we're not causing an involuntary or a false confession? So the timing is very current for you to ask that question, Tom, is we're hoping within the next week or two, the Supreme Court acknowledges whether or not they're actually going to take the case and then make a decision from there. And to take that one step

further, since that has happened, WZ and our public sector classes and law enforcement classes now actually dedicates some time in the class to talk about false confessions, to talk about the risks associated with conducting an improper interview. And we actually use video clips from Brendan Dassey's interrogation to show detectives and investigators what not to do. Here's some of the issues that we can fall into. what not to do here's some of the issues that that we can fall into and the reason I really like to use those clips is you don't see a detective physically abusing somebody you don't see any direct threats as you see the subtle implicit promises the subtle hints of you're going to be okay just over and

over and over again so so we've incorporated that into our into our program and to your last question where can people learn more about it? First, I'll mention some of the partners that I, when I say partners, these are just people I look up to that really have a wealth of information. I know I've mentioned the Center on Wrongful Conviction of Youth out of Northwestern Law. They've got a lot of great information, a lot of great publications, and really a lot of good work. The Juvenile Law Center out of Philadelphia, they co-authored our amicus brief last year again a group that just a lot of good work in the spirit of justice for juveniles the innocence project a lot of good work on wrongful convictions

specifically focused around DNA exonerations I know I mentioned Saul Kesson's name, just another academic I really look up to out of John Jay. He's got a ton of publications. He does as well as his students and some other staff at John Jay. James Trainham is the author of the book I mentioned earlier, another great resource and a really good book I recommend is How Police Generate False Confessions. And then from a WZ standpoint, our website is just w-z.com and we actually have a page on our website if you backslash truth where we've taken all the all these different references on listing are all on our website and we really try to find

articles or publications that talk about interviews that went sideways or books that should be read or publications from the chiefs of police. And we'll put them on that part of our landing page and our website to help educate, you know, attendees of WZ. So I recommend anybody who wants to learn more about false confessions or, or our involvement in the, the amicus brief or what we talked about today, it's w-z.com slash truth, and all that information is right there. So Dave, what we'll do to wrap up here,

we really appreciate your time. I know that speaking for myself and our team here at the LPRC, we do feel a lot better knowing that you and your team are out there. You're always pushing to the cutting edge to help support the practitioners out there. You're always pushing to the cutting edge to help support the practitioners out there that really are dealing with an incredible level of crime and loss. And so

strong and valid investigative techniques are mission critical in law enforcement and in the private sector as well, of course. Evidence-based is better, but at the end of the day, we don't want people to be too concerned and too scared out there, but rather that there's a prudent approach, a reasonable approach going on that Dave Thompson and his team are continually making sure up to the speed on the latest research and development in that area, as well as working with the courts and others that are trying to shape opinion or shape practice out there. So on behalf of Dave Thompson of WZ and Kevin Tran, our producer here at the LPRC, and Tom

Ian from Control Tech, everybody have a fantastic week. Thanks so much.