Police Training Firm Dumps Interrogation Technique Linked To Multiple False Confessions

Legal Issues

from the curbing-liability dept

There may be a significant shift in police interrogation methods over the next several years. The Marshall Project reports one of the nation’s largest police consulting firms is abandoning a technique that has been used by a majority of law enforcement agencies over the last six decades. It’s called the Reid Technique, and it’s been linked to a large number of false confessions. But after fifty-plus years of religious reliance on the technique, the consulting firm says it’s no longer going to be training officers to deploy it.

Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a consulting group that says it has worked with a majority of U.S. police departments, said Monday it will stop training detectives in the method it has taught since 1984.

“Confrontation is not an effective way of getting truthful information,” said Shane Sturman, the company’s president and CEO. “This was a big move for us, but it’s a decision that’s been coming for quite some time. More and more of our law enforcement clients have asked us to remove it from their training based on all the academic research showing other interrogation styles to be much less risky.”

It should have been viewed as risky from the beginning. The technique, first deployed in 1955 by a police polygraph expert named John Reid, uses nine steps to push arrestees towards confessions. It relies in part on officers making judgment calls on body language, when not encouraging them to directly lie to arrested subjects. The thing about the Reid Technique is that the first deployment in 1955, by Reid himself, secured a false confession. This resulted in a state supreme court decision tossing out the suspect’s conviction on the basis the false confession had been coerced.

Despite this inauspicious start, the Reid Technique has remained popular pretty much everywhere, even as confessions secured with the technique are frequently proven to be false. Given its creator was deeply fond of polygraph testing, it should come as no surprise the confessions elicited by the technique would be dubious at best.

The company behind the technique claims it’s still as useful as ever, if not even better given recent, unspecified “updates.”

Joseph P. Buckley, the president of John E. Reid & Associates, which licenses the Reid method, said Wednesday that Wicklander-Zulawski’s announcement was “very misleading and disingenuous.” He said the technique has consistently held up in court and that it is not “confrontational” except when evidence already suggests the suspect’s guilt.

The technique relies on confrontation. It relies on officers lying about the amount of evidence they’ve gathered, making false claims about admissions from conspirators, or simply refusing to believe anything an arrestee says unless it agrees with their predetermined conclusions. It’s a terrible system but it’s been in use for years and no one’s in a hurry to let it go — especially when convictions and plea deals go on the immediate bottom line. Exonerations — if and when they happen — are years or decades down the road. They’re someone else’s problem on someone else’s criminal justice ledger.

The sad thing is the Reid Technique was better than the interrogation technique it replaced: violent beatings. But all it did was shift the violence from the front of the house to back of the house, replacing beatings with a large number of easily-avoidable false confessions. After decades of ruined lives, a major player in law enforcement training has decided it’s no longer interested in making police officers worse. That’s a huge step forward.

Filed Under: false confessions, good cop bad cop, police, reid technique