ProPublica Exposes Even More Cop Junk Science: Using 911 Calls To Determine If People Are Lying

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the let's-play-pretend-but-with-people's-lives dept

Cops like science. Not in the way that say, scientists like science. They just like science-y sounding mumbo jumbo that paves the way for criminal convictions.

And, sure, maybe you’re thinking this only applies to backwoods agencies that prefer to use a combination of Aunt Cleo and questionable testimony to lock people up. But it’s not just low-tech, underfunded departments with few investigative options. It’s also the DOJ and the FBI, both of which have continued to support forensic junk science despite admitting the science isn’t solid and that their “expert” witnesses have routinely misrepresented the accuracy of their findings.

Anybody who claims they can tell someone is lying or is otherwise suspicious just by watching or talking to them for a few minutes is lying to themselves, if not to jurors and judges. Claimed characteristics of suspected criminals overlap common human behavior so much that the Venn diagram is a single circle. A successful cop guess isn’t something that should be backdated as “behavioral detection.” Winning on a roll of the dice does happen. That it happens isn’t the result of anything the dice roller did.

And yet, cops continue to pay for the opportunity (with tax dollars obv) to be talked into believing their instincts are not only correct, but backed by actual science. The market for preaching to the converted — as well as those willing to convert — is immense. Cops who think they can actually distinguish one pair of mass-produced jeans from another pair simply by staring at low-quality CCTV footage are pretty much willing to believe anything. And they’re willing to use tax dollars to pretend their wild ass guesses are backed by science.

More junk science is upon us, wielded by people with the power to end lives and deprive people of their freedom. This latest report comes to us from ProPublica, which uncovered certain law enforcement agencies’ reliance on speculative fiction (i.e. “forensic science”) to convert writing samples pulled from statements to police into admissible evidence — despite there being no evidence (IRONY!) this was any more accurate than tossing coins to determine guilt.

If you think looking at people’s written statements is a stupid way to determine whether someone’s lying, just wait for this one. According to this ProPublica report by Brett Murphy, one person (and his law enforcement students) are convinced they can establish guilt by cherry-picking words and phrases from 911 calls.

Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said.

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.

Welcome to Premiseville, USA, where all the points are made up and actual science doesn’t matter! [APPLAUSE SIGN flickers, arrested for “furtive movements”]

[Waits for applause to die down] Well, it looks like we have a disqualification. [scattered boos]

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

Well, to quote Socrates: “Duh.” This ain’t science. This is someone tying a divining rod to their AMC Pacer before driving past the crime scene. The only difference is that cops didn’t yell at Deputy Police Chief Tracy Harpster for disturbing the integrity of the crime scene. Far from it. Cops — including some federal cops — appear to believe he’s the second coming of Columbo, capable of hearing guilt in phone calls made by extremely stressed people suffering through the worst days of their lives.

Being distraught is just evidence of wrongdoing, said Harpster. Despite not actually collecting any confessions via 911 calls, Harpster pressed forward with his behavioral observation theory. And despite collecting zero support from any behavioral scientists, law enforcement began to buy in. And prosecutors who value collecting wins over actual justice offered their support.

In 2016, Missouri prosecutor Leah Askey wrote Harpster an effusive email, bluntly detailing how she skirted legal rules to exploit his methods against unwitting defendants.

“Of course this line of research is not ‘recognized’ as a science in our state,” Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the method’s legitimacy. She said she disguised 911 call analysis in court by “getting creative … without calling it ‘science.’”

The ends (even if completely wrong) justify the means. The means are wrong, too, but it’s the ends, baby! Locking people up! That’s what we do. Who needs evidence when you have a deputy police chief and his ridiculous assertions about 911 calls?

This prosecutor already had a wrongful conviction on her record, thanks to her reliance on Harpster’s unreliable narration. But having a conviction overturned and her “expert” 911 call testimony tossed didn’t deter her. She took this loss and turned it into a win, glossing over the overturning while providing a blurb for Harpster’s book and marketing materials.

Harpster continues to claim he’s just doing Law Enforcement God’s Work in his promotional materials, claiming that he can tell whether or not a 911 caller is a murderer. He also claims he has “personally consulted” in 1,500 homicide investigations. Perhaps his definition of “consulting” includes unreturned phone calls. Very few agencies are willing to admit they’ve used Harpster’s 911 tea leaves to secure convictions.

ProPublica recounts — thanks to public records requests and law enforcement sources — Harpster’s unlikely rise to a position of junk science prominence. Harpster may currently be a deputy police chief, but there’s nothing on his record that suggests he was ever anything more than an average cop. He worked for years serving a small Ohio town of 6,500. His commendations have little to do with law enforcement work. Instead, they show he was a decent human being capable of volunteering time to help the less fortunate.

That’s a good thing. More cops need to do more for their communities. But somehow, despite his lack of investigative experience or track record in closing difficult cases, Harpster became an “expert” in sussing out criminal intent via 911 calls. It all appears to have started with Harpster’s attendance of classes held by the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In 2004, a regular cop named Harpster entered. Ten weeks later, he perceived himself as some sort of super-cop.

After he left the FBI Academy that winter, Harpster enrolled at the University of Cincinnati to pursue a graduate degree in criminal justice. For his master’s thesis, he collected 100 recordings of 911 calls — half of the callers had been found guilty of something and the other half hadn’t. Harpster believed he could analyze these calls for clues. In his thesis’ acknowledgments, he said he wouldn’t have started the project without Adams, “the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Based on patterns he heard in the tapes, Harpster said he was able to identify certain indicators that correlated with guilt and others with innocence. For instance, “Huh?” in response to a dispatcher’s question is an indicator of guilt in Harpster’s system. So is an isolated “please.” He identified 20 such indicators and then counted how often they appeared in his sample of guilty calls.

That’s what Harpster said. He attempted to publish a study on his dubious findings with an FBI behavioral scientist (John Jarvis). It never happened, which means it was never peer-reviewed. The unpublished, unvetted work, however, gained traction in the law enforcement community. The party at fault? The FBI, which sent out the unpublished, unverified quasi-study as part of a law enforcement bulletin in 2008. The FBI never noted the study had not been published or vetted.

Cops assumed that if the FBI had linked to it, the study must be valid. A sheriff’s department utilized the minimal information to arrest a widow for the murder of her husband, claiming her use of the words “blood,” “somebody,” and “I’m sorry” during her 911 call indicated she had killed her spouse. The prosecutor secured a conviction using this report from the sheriff’s department — one based on an unpublished study by some dude who once attended FBI classes.

While it’s easy to point fingers at Harpster and his Midwestern, small-town under-qualifications as a forensic 911 phone call examiner, a whole lot of blame rests with the FBI, which apparently hasn’t met a junk science it doesn’t like.

For more than 12 years, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency helped 911 call analysis grow unabated. FBI officials at a charity fundraiser have even auctioned a copy of the book Harpster and Adams wrote about it. 

After twelve years of treating Harpster’s unproven assumptions as actual science, the FBI finally decided to apply a bit of the old scientific method. What it discovered was that Harpster’s 911 call theories were unscientific garbage — something it could have easily ascertained more than a decade ago.

[The FBI] ended up warning against using that research to bring actual cases. The indicators were so inconsistent, the experts said, that some went “in the opposite direction of what was previously found.”

This fall, a separate group of FBI experts in the same unit tested Harpster’s model, this time in missing child cases. Again, their findings contradicted his, so much so that they said applying 911 call analysis in real life “may exacerbate bias.”

The FBI, with its billions in funding, arrived with too little far too late. Damage has already been done. Prosecutors and cops relying on this so-called “evidence” were unlikely to reexamine cases based on 911 call evidence. The FBI, meanwhile, has never bothered to do anything more than suggest more research is needed. No one from the agency has contacted Harpster to tell him the stuff he peddles to cop shops isn’t worth the paper local copy shops are charging him to produce brochures.

The last thing the FBI said publicly about Harpster’s voodoo logic continues to help cops lock up possibly innocent people.

Days after the arrest, he sent an email to Harpster, thanking him for analyzing Benning’s 911 calls. “It significantly helped our district attorney to realize the indicators of guilt in the phone calls,” Gibbons wrote, “as well as suggestions on how to introduce the 911 calls to the jury during trial.” He alluded to other forensic experts but said Harpster’s consultation was “instrumental in swaying the prosecutor to file charges.”

[The Santa Ana PD detective] said he didn’t just find out about Harpster by chance: The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit recommended him. Gibbons’ email came two years after the bureau’s own experts in that same division first publicly warned law enforcement not to use 911 call analysis in actual cases.

Harpster has no scientific leg to stand on. And that’s according to the FBI, which has long given junk science and faux scientists a long leash. Yet, Harpster continues to stand sturdily on his remaining pseudoscientific, hunch-abetting leg. He’s a tireless contributor to law enforcement investigations… even though he does not possess a single qualification that would make him worthy of law enforcement time, funds, or attention.

Harpster makes himself available day and night to take phone calls from police and prosecutors looking to validate a hunch or strategize for trial. He once hosted a former student from Florida at his lakeside vacation house in Michigan, where he claimed on his Facebook page that they “solved a murder.” Last year, a detective called him for input while standing over someone’s body at a crime scene.

Police often email him 911 tapes for consultations — men and women wailing on the phone as they plead with the dispatcher to save a loved one. Sometimes it’s a parent holding a dead child. In one case, Harpster listened to an Ohio mother’s desperate call for help and then wrote back, simply, “Call me. … DIRTY!!!!” The mother was not charged.

Keep this uncomfortable (for several reasons) fact in mind: violations of constitutional rights are crimes. That most may be handled in civil cases does not mean illegally convicting or incarcerating people isn’t criminal activity. If Harpster was showing people how to avoid law enforcement attention while distributing drugs, he’d be rung up on RICO charges. But somehow aiding and abetting law enforcement in violating rights isn’t considered worthy of criminal conspiracy charges, even if the end result is plenty of illegal activity by cops and prosecutors.

How does no one in law enforcement question testimonials like this these?

A police chief in Michigan said Harpster’s class paid off immediately after a man called 911 and said he had just found his mother and sister dead. “He made the mistake of saying ‘I need help,’” the chief explained.

What the actual fuck. A police chief claiming someone saying “I need help” while accessing the ne plus ultra of help lines is evidence of criminal intent should be greeted with riotous laughter. Instead, it’s just another feather in the cap of a guy who thinks he can hear lies through crackling phone lines during incidents nearly every private citizen is ill-equipped to handle.

Read the whole report. It will make you want to carve your spleen out and convert it into zealous defense lawyers and firebombs. Cops don’t care. Prosecutors don’t care. Some random dude attended some courses at the FBI and wandered out of them with a headful of bad ideas. And these bad ideas were propagated by the FBI, which only realized its error more than a decade later. At that point it was too late. The damage was done. And, with a decade of full support for some random cop and his “I can hear lies” theories, the FBI’s carelessness continues to do damage. Cops take the FBI’s word as gospel, even when it’s clearly horseshit. The only thing a cop trusts is another cop. So, when cops are wrong, cops will be the last to believe it. And while they come around to the uncomfortable truth, people’s lives will be ruined.

Filed Under: 911, fbi, junk science, lie detector, tracy harpster