Mark Fallon

As a Special Agent with NCIS, you participated in the investigation and prosecution of the Blind Sheik, an Egyptian terrorist convicted of, among other things, conspiring to attack military and civilian targets in the United States. As the NCIS Chief of Counterintelligence Operations for the Middle East, you led the task force that investigated the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. You have extensive experience interviewing suspects accused of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Many might find it hard to believe that a rapport-based approach to interviewing is effective with hardened criminals, much less an international terrorist. Why does rapport, instead of coercion, work?

Rapport works for a few reasons. One reason is the psychological underpinnings, especially if you’re using some of the newer techniques in rapport-building. What I’ve found through my career—starting with the U.S. Marshal Service in 1979 and NCIS in 1981—is that resistance is often not what we think it is. There’s research by Robert Cialdini about reciprocity, which shows that people will often reciprocate when treated in a certain way. Some research shows that about one-third of people are predisposed to provide information, so the key is to not ruin it. When I speak to groups of investigators or interrogators, I always tell them: “Don’t screw that up. You have a third of people predisposed to cooperate; the only thing you can do is ruin it by doing anything other than listening.”

For instance, I debriefed the Emir of the Jemaah Islamiyah training camp in Southeast Asia years ago. He cooperated and gave information, and I asked him, “What did the police do to trigger you to cooperate?” This individual, Nasir Abbas, told me that as a Muslim, he was treated with respect, and he had to reciprocate that respect. He said, “I was required, based on my religion, to treat them with respect.” I think that’s part of human nature.

Now, with the science available, we understand why rapport is so much more effective than older, coercive techniques. When I first began, I was trained to believe that an innocent person would never confess to a crime they didn’t commit. I was wrong, and we were wrong, but we didn’t know better at the time. Today, however, we know better, and there’s no longer any excuse for using outdated techniques that often lead to unintended consequences. When I give talks or testify—I’ve testified in 10 different state legislatures advocating for abandoning confession-driven tactics and deceptive techniques like the false evidence ploy—I face resistance. It’s usually from police unions, not from police administrators. These unions often instinctively argue that we’re taking away their tools. I respond by saying, “You wouldn’t issue a weapon that haphazardly misfires and hits unintended targets, so why would you do the same with your interview programs?” Unfortunately, that’s what’s been happening. Police aren’t trying to cause harm—they’re trying to solve crimes—but they don’t know better. They don’t realize how their actions contribute to the mistrust that is now widespread in communities.

We’re seeing issues like problems with recruitment and retention of officers, calls for defunding the police, and demands for police reforms. We need to start policing with virtue—restoring trust. Policing with virtue is a step closer to community embrace, and that’s where we need to go.

In addition to several other assignments where you had a role in training, from 2008 to 2010, you were the assistant director of training at FLETC. Can you talk about your perspective on the current state of law enforcement training especially when it comes to training law enforcement officers to conduct investigative interviews?

I have evolved and the practice is evolving. I wound up being thrown into several different situations that have caused me to take a hard look at what we’re doing. I was working years ago at a conference with Dr. Maria Hartwig from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and she was just notified that she’d be going on a sabbatical. I thought, “Oh, what is this?” She said, “It gives you an academic kind of a break and a chance to think.” I said, “Well, the government gave that to me, we call that retirement.” So, I’ve had a lot of time to think back on that career. My father was the commander of the detective bureau growing up. He was always a detective and retired as deputy chief of police. My grandfather was a councilman and a commissioner of police. My father-in-law was a detective and actually my father’s partner, my brother-in-law was a police officer, and my nephew is a Detective Lieutenant. I mean, I come from a blue blood family. One of the things I loved about NCIS was going around the world and working with different police agencies, whether it’s the Australian Federal Police or the police in Bangkok or the Philippines, wherever. It was a great opportunity for me as a police professional.

When I first began, I was trained to believe that an innocent person would never confess to a crime they didn’t commit. I was wrong, and we were wrong, but we didn’t know better at the time. We are all vulnerable to false evidence ploys and psychological manipulation from coercive methods.

After the 9/11 attacks occurred, I was appointed to be the chief investigator for al-Qaeda for the military commissions process. I was detailed from NCIS to Army CID – Criminal Investigations Division – to work directly for the General Counsel’s Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was Donald Rumsfeld at that time. We established a task force to bring terrorists to justice. President Bush decided that the federal district courts were not what he wanted to use. He wanted to use his Article 2 authority as Commander-in-Chief to try them as enemy combatants under the military processes. We had to sit down and say, “Okay, we’ve got this new mission.” I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. How do we best do this? We brought in a team of operational psychologists and operators who have experience, and I said, “Let’s figure out how to best approach this mission.” I had help from operational psychologists from the intelligence community, including the CIA. It was clear that relationship-based methodologies were the most effective. We designed a training program that everyone had to go through before they deployed to Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or Iraq. The task force was about 230 people, and we had folks in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It was a global task force, so we were going around the world looking to make cases for our commissions process.

The first thing we said was that so many people were trained in … forget Reid. I don’t want to pin everything on Reid because you don’t have to be Reid-trained to have confession-driven tactics, and they don’t have the entire market on coercion in police interviewing. But the fact that a lot of people had that training, we had to neutralize that. We said, “That doesn’t work. We need intelligence. We need to know who these people are. We don’t want you to guess what they may have done. We need legitimate intelligence to protect our national security.” So, we had a program that emphasized rapport-building relationships and understanding the person and the culture.

There was certainly controversy, and while President Bush was still in office, about the time I was transferring from being the NCIS Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism to be the director of the NCIS Training Academy, the Office of Director of National Intelligence was conducting a study. This was mandated by President Bush, who wanted to know why we were getting all this bad information. I’m not just talking about the derivative product of torture, but also information where uninformed decisions were made. Why were we getting bad data from these thousands of interviews being conducted globally? We knew the information was bad because we couldn’t validate it. Under pressure, people were just trying to appease their interviewers. I do expert witness work, reviewing interrogations. There’s a thing called false confessions, but what I see is a lot of false concessions. They make these little concessions to alleviate the pressure, and then they get locked in. The interviewers then hone in and push them further down an abyss of more and more concessions. Then they can’t get out of it because they feel locked into what they said. But it’s just to try to alleviate the pressure; it’s not the truth.

What shocked me when the study was published, called “Educing Information,” and they also came to FLETC. This study pertained to efficacy and they looked at our training curriculum and the FBI Academy training curriculum. They came down to see us, talked to us, and went to local police departments like Boston PD. What they discovered was that it had been more than 50 years since the government had conducted any significant research on why somebody would talk. We were operating on this customary learning where we would say, “I was successful in this case, and I’m going to tell you a story about what I did, hoping you can emulate what I did and see if it works for you.” That was how we learned. That was a way of looking at best practices, which I really don’t like the term “best practices,” but rather “successful practices,” because you can always improve. That’s how we learned.

The problem with confession-driven tactics is that they’re effective in getting confessions from guilty parties. The issue is they’re also effective in getting confessions from innocent people.

So, that was shocking to me. I was the Assistant Director of Training for FLETC, with over 600 instructors and 10 training divisions. We had a behavioral science division training law enforcement, teaching methods that were not grounded in science. I said, “We have to put an end to this.” When I was first director of the NCIS Academy, we were having Wicklander-Zulawski (WZ) provide interrogation training. FLETC was teaching a 5-step approach, and then they moved into confession-driven training, which wasn’t based on science. The first thing I did as director of the NCIS Academy was not renew that contract. WZ will no longer teach the Reid approach.

I said, “We have incredible experience in doing interviews and interrogations through our careers, particularly with the global war on terrorism.” The CITF was the name of the task force I ran for 2.5 years. It was estimated that the task force conducted over 10,000 interviews and interrogations globally. We debriefed our investigators about what worked and what didn’t work. We had quite a bit of knowledge about what we thought worked, and it was clear that confession-driven methodologies were not just ineffective but counterproductive.

When I got to FLETC, I called for what’s called a curriculum review conference, where we brought in the partner organizations and agencies. For those who don’t know, FLETC has over 100 partner organizations. When I was there, we had 3,000 students in residential training. It’s the premier training center for federal agents. There are other academies like the Secret Service Academy, OSI Academy, ICE Academy, US Marshal Service Academy. Federal agents go to FLETC, and then they go to their agencies’ academies. So, when I called for the curriculum review conference and brought people in, we found there was great dissatisfaction with confession-driven methods. People didn’t like them, didn’t want them, but didn’t know of an alternative. I started a psychologist consortium. My goal was to put a psychologist in the training division, but the director didn’t want me to do that. So, I started with the behavioral science division, which was training investigators in interviews and interrogations. I created this consortium of psychologists to help operators and instructors understand that there is some science that could be the underpinning of our future training. Before that, when an instructor would have to update their lesson plans, they would do a Google search. The more sophisticated ones would use Google Scholar. They wouldn’t understand the research or research methodologies, but they would usually find something that supported their view. Then they’d build that into their lesson plans, which is not a professional way to do it. When I started the consortium, we started getting more acceptance that there is science to help us do our job better.

Many exoneration cases, when they go to court, are generally due to the physical science of DNA determining wrongful convictions. Innocent people spend time in prison while guilty people remain free. However, those departments and investigators aren’t impacted because these events often happen decades later. Their department budgets aren’t penalized for the civil suits, which have amounted to over $4 billion paid to exonerees. That’s billions with a B. This is a crisis happening now. We need to accelerate the evolution in state and local police departments.

After I retired from FLETC and the US government in 2010, President Obama had issued his executive order, which was the genesis for creating the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). The president said, “We’re not going to torture anymore, but we need to know the most effective means to elicit accurate and reliable information to protect our national security.” A multi-agency task force was formed to look at this. The administration at that time committed funding and resources not just to establish the HIG but also to establish a body of research to help inform the practice. The initial intention was intelligence interviewing. When I was appointed as the first chair of the HIG research committee and as a consultant to the HIG to help train some of the first interviewers and interrogators, it was amazing to see the commitment. Since then, the HIG has commissioned over 150 studies, which have resulted in over 225 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals to help inform the practice. Much of law enforcement, particularly at the state and local level, is totally oblivious to this commitment of millions of dollars in research to help improve the practice and public safety. They’re resistant. When you watch use-of-force videos, you always say, “Don’t resist. Don’t resist.” Well, that’s what I tell them with the science. Don’t resist. Evolve into methods that are in your best interest. It will help you do your job.

The good news is that, particularly at the federal level, there are pockets of excellence in policing that have embraced the science, as you have, Scott, and what you’re doing. Others are improving the practice of policing in these pockets of excellence. The NCIS Training Academy evolved, and now they only use science-based methods. FLETC has totally revamped their training program. They’ve abandoned the five-step program and embraced the research. They are now only teaching science-based methods. Other federal agencies are evolving to do the same. Now, anyone who’s going to be a Secret Service agent or work for Homeland Security Investigations or Army CID goes through the FLETC criminal investigative training program, which teaches science-based methods. Then they move to advanced training programs. I don’t know if that science-based training could be mitigated if you go to an add-on that’s still teaching confession-based methods. That’s the concern and the problem. When you look around, there’s Vern Pierson, the District Attorney in El Dorado County, California. He has an annual conference where he brings in researchers like Lawrence and Emily Allison, who work with the HIG, to teach this rapport-based methodology. Over 100 departments in California have received that training. I was out in Wichita, KS, last summer, and their police department is now training other departments in science-based methods. That’s what’s encouraging to me.

I was very frustrated for years at the slow pace of evolution, but now I’m encouraged. I’m encouraged to speak to you because of what you’re doing. I’m encouraged to do work with the Innocence Project, speaking to state legislatures and police departments, attending conferences with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and talking about these methods. The psychological sciences can have the same impact on improving policing as the physical science of DNA. That’s where we need to get to. We need to stop resisting change and embrace methods that are more effective.

There’s a thing called false confessions, but what I see is a lot of false concessions. They make these little concessions to alleviate the pressure, and then they get locked in … it’s not the truth.

The problem with confession-driven tactics is that they’re effective in getting confessions from guilty parties. The issue is they’re also effective in getting confessions from innocent people. The new methodologies are more effective at getting admissions and intelligence, and they’re less likely to produce false information. There is no legitimate reason not to embrace these new methodologies, other than stubbornness or fear. I think part of this might have to do with identity. If you became a chief and were trained in confession-driven practices, you used them in your career, and you were successful, it’s hard to accept that what you were doing wasn’t effective for the reason you thought it was. You may have gotten some false information or used a practice that implanted memories in a witness. That’s hard to conceive, but I think that’s part of the problem.

The other part is that these cases, when they go to court, are generally due to the physical science of DNA determining wrongful convictions. Innocent people spend time in prison while guilty people remain free. However, those departments and investigators aren’t impacted because these events often happen decades later. Their department budgets aren’t penalized for the civil suits, which have amounted to over $4 billion paid to exonerees. That’s billions with a B. This is a crisis happening now. We need to accelerate the evolution in state and local police departments.

We need to ensure that interrogations are recorded. I’ve just entered into a partnership with a company that does recording equipment and methodology use. NCIS was the first federal agency to mandate this (audio recording interviews) as a policy for their agencies. It was added later when the Attorney General mandated the Department of Justice to do it. But there are still 10 states that don’t require recordings. To get over these hurdles, we need legislative fixes. That’s why I’m now going to state legislatures, advocating for legislative measures to reject deception and evolve to science-based methods. This will improve practice and professionalize policing. That’s what’s encouraging. I was in Washington state last year talking to legislators there. They proposed a bill rejecting deception with juveniles, which is a great first step. But those states that have rejected it with juveniles need to take the next step and reject it with adults. California has rejected deception with juveniles and requires certification for training with science-based methods for juvenile interviews. Now, we need the same legislative changes for adults.

The minimum should be requiring recordings. With recordings, you have a gauge to review and measure. Then, we need to reject deception and embrace science. For states that haven’t yet, I was out in Minnesota testifying about this. It’s great that they had a bill rejecting deception with juveniles, but now we need the same for adults. Juveniles are more vulnerable, but we are all vulnerable to false evidence ploys and psychological manipulation from coercive methods.

In your book, Unjustifiable Means, you wrote, “America has always been strongest when our actions match our values” and outline how the US government’s interrogation programs at Guantanamo Bay and other prisons and black sites around the world, had far deviated from those values. Can you talk about the Machiavellian slippery slope in law enforcement where investigators desire to catch the bad guy, get a confession, or win a case can cause their actions to not match their values?

Sometimes, when you want something in the worst way, you get it in the worst way. You brought up the issue of justifying the means. The problem we had there was we had people who were being interviewed and interrogated from, well I can’t say on the battlefield because most of those people, weren’t from the battlefield. They were bounties that we paid for, but anyway, there was some type of interview that was conducted prior to them going to Guantanamo. Guantanamo had almost 800 people cycle through it during what we called the Global War on Terror, or the War on Terror. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was probably only about 500 people anyway, but we had so many people who were feared. Through the lens that they were looked at, it was suspected that they were terrorists, enough to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which, according to the Secretary of Defense, was for the worst of the worst. We’re hearing that again now as we’re sending migrants there. But I had more investigators working investigations to exonerate detainees at Gitmo than I did working to prosecute at military commissions at Gitmo because the prison was filled with hundreds and hundreds of people who never should have been there in the first place. The ineffective screening interviews put them there, and then you have the stigma once they’re there. I once tried to write a recommendation to have a detainee released from Guantanamo or transferred because there was absolutely no evidence against the person. I sent my recommendation to the Pentagon, which then went to inter-agency review from the CIA, FBI, National Security Council, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They disagreed with my recommendation because they said the person was a known terrorist! I had a liaison officer who was an agent with the INS, and I called him and said, “What the hell’s going on here? I just recommended a prisoner for release, and your agency says he’s a known terrorist. I’m the guy who was asked to prosecute terrorists, why don’t I know that?” He said, “Well, we just said that because the person is a prisoner at Gitmo.” And so, you get this cycle where if you’re convinced that someone is guilty, it can impact your decision.

What I have to tell people is that as an interviewer, you’re not the judge or jury; you’re not the arbitrator of guilt. You’re the one eliciting information, and that information needs to be obtained so that informed decisions can be made. It could be an informed decision about the direction your case takes or about the decisions your supervisor, command staff, or prosecutor makes. But you need accurate, reliable information to do so.

That’s where you get into these confession-driven methodologies. If your goal is to get a confession, it’s an effective way to do it. Sometimes, you have to show people that things work differently. When FLETC started embracing science and scientists, there was initial resistance. For example, when I first heard about recording interrogations, I wondered, “Why do we want to record our interrogations?” In fact, NCIS started doing this not because we were worried about abuse, but because of the CSI effect. Television depicts interrogation as a very confrontational matter, with people slamming the table and getting abusive.

Another thing we did was with Project Alethia, which was focused on interviewing tradition and the trajectory. I was one of the central figures in initiatives within interviewing and research practice, publishing the book Interviewing and Interrogation: A Review of Research and Practice Since World War II. We told researchers, “You need to write so that a practitioner understands what you’re writing.” We don’t understand research methodologies. We don’t necessarily know that different research methods carry different values, and some have more weight than others. The problem with law enforcement is that we don’t know this, so unless we embrace scientists to help us understand and implement these programs, we’re operating at a disadvantage. That’s why I talk about bridging the gap between science and the practice of interrogation. I wrote a piece in Applied Cognitive Psychology years ago when I was chair of the research committee, saying that collaboration between science and practitioners would improve practice. I also wrote a piece in Police Chief Magazine, along with Dr. Christian Meisner, who was the chief researcher at the HIG, that science will improve the practice.

When I was chair of the IMPACT section at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), which publishes Police Chief Magazine, I wrote another piece called “Untruths and Consequences,” talking about the consequences of legacy practices—customary learning that produces unintended consequences. This is why I’m so passionate about what I do. People are just unaware. Police chiefs, for example, are not aware of how their training or how they’re conducting their interviews may be contributing to distrust with the police. Police officers often use the false evidence technique, like lying about evidence, to try and get a confession. They lie to the person to see if they’re guilty, but if that person is not guilty, they suspect the officer will just drop the issue. Well, we know that doesn’t always happen. The person goes back into the community and says, “Hey, the cops just lied to me. They tried to set me up. They said they had evidence they didn’t have.” Is that what society expects from the police in the United States? In other countries, like in Europe, it’s not acceptable to lie during an interrogation.

Much of law enforcement, particularly at the state and local level, is totally oblivious to this commitment of millions of dollars in research to help improve the practice (of investigative interviewing) and public safety.

That’s why I talk about policing with virtue. We’re the good guys, and we should not be promoting a culture of deceit within our police departments. If you can lie during an interrogation, can your supervisor lie to you? If you asked a police officer if he was involved in an officer-involved shooting and he’s under tremendous pressure, should internal affairs be able to lie to him about the evidence they have against him? Of course not. That’s unacceptable. You can’t lie to someone who’s doing their job, so why would you lie to the community you’re serving? To me, it’s not acceptable for policing to embrace deceit, especially when we know it’s not effective. We know that it produces false results, and those false results allow perpetrators to remain on the streets because we’ve been looking at the wrong person.

One of the findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on Torture was that the CIA’s justification for their post-9/11 interrogation practices was based on inaccurate claims of effectiveness. I wonder if a parallel can be drawn with how many civilian law enforcement officers believe that the deception-detection and guilt-presumptive interrogation techniques they’ve learned are effective, so they continue to use them?

Early on in my career, I was one of those who would have said the same thing. I’ve evolved because I’ve learned. I’ve reflected on what I was doing and thought about how I can use those experiences to ensure that my successors are better equipped to deal with things than I was. When I was trying to argue against the use of abusive practices, I didn’t know the research. I didn’t have it. I was arguing based on my experience. My experience was that rapport-building worked, but some police officers who have used aggressive techniques have similar experiences, and claimed coercive tactics worked. But it may not have worked the way they thought. There’s no doubt in my mind that when I talk to some investigators and police unions, they truly believe they need to use deception. They truly believe that it helps them, but they are either uninformed or misinformed. That’s the problem with some of these commercial off-the-shelf training programs. These programs, which promote confession-driven approaches, sound scientific, but they’re not. A department doesn’t have to invest in educating someone in the science or finding a connection to scientists who could help them. Instead, they just buy the program off the shelf, checking a box. That’s the problem. Policing needs to improve its practices, and to do that, they need to embrace science. We talk about evidence-based policing, constitutional policing, and ethical policing, but none of that can happen if we’re still promoting deceptive and counterproductive practices.

After extensive investigatory experience at the highest levels, you had seen firsthand that coercive techniques including torture didn’t produce accurate information. You were part of a 15-member panel of experts from around the globe who crafted what we now know today as the Mendez Principles for Effective Interviewing for Investigations and Information Gathering. Can you talk about the Mendez Principles and what they might be able to offer local and state law enforcement officers?

You know, a part of my life that I’m very proud of—let me tell you how I got there because it’s an interesting story, at least to me. I was contacted by a staff member for Professor Juan Mendez. Juan Mendez is a professor emeritus at GW Law at American University in Washington, D.C., but he was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. At the end of his six-year term, which was during the height of the global War on Terror, and the height of when interrogation abuses and torture were uncovered and reported, he had to produce what they called the “thematic” that he was going to present at the UN General Assembly in 2016.

The new methodologies (science-based interviewing) are more effective at getting admissions and intelligence, and they’re less likely to produce false information. There is no legitimate reason not to embrace these new methodologies, other than stubbornness or fear. I think part of this might have to do with identity. If you became a chief and were trained in confession-driven practices, you used them in your career, and you were successful, it’s hard to accept that what you were doing wasn’t effective for the reason you thought it was.

I got a call from one of his staff members with the Anti-Torture Initiative at GW University, which was a center under Juan Mendez. She said that Juan Mendez would like my help in preparing the thematic on the state of interrogation practice. I said, “Well, I’ would love to help him. Do you want my hourly rate or my daily rate? How would you like to do this?” She said, “It’s pro bono.” I said, “Okay, well, I’ll do it anyway.”

What that did was Juan brought together, I think, over 100 people, but he brought us together at American University, and a number of us sat around for a couple of days with folks from the UK, Norway and around the world to talk about the state of the practice globally. One of the things we recognized was that there was no standard. We needed a global standard on how interview practices should go. There had to be some type of standard. We have standards for firearms; we have different standards for various things. What’s the standard for interviewing and interrogation?

Juan’s thematic boiled it down to the fact that we need a universal standard because there wasn’t one. That standard should be based on three things: law, science, and ethics. Of course, my experience with the HIG enlightened me to a body of research that I was unaware of. One of my contributions was that we need to use science to inform the practice, to improve the practice, and to integrate science into the practice. The science-based approach was what I consistently emphasized should be incorporated into that thematic.

Juan submitted the thematic, and it caught the attention of folks within the UN Secretary General for Human Rights. Juan’s successor as the Special Rapporteur on Torture was tasked with continuing along that continuum. In 2017, I was asked to speak at a side event during the UN General Assembly in New York City. At these side events, I spoke about how uninformed decisions were being made. From a leadership perspective, we went to war with Iraq based on partial information obtained from a prisoner who said there was al-Qaeda in Iraq. He just said that to stop the pain. This was magnified to the level that we went to war based on false information. We need to embrace research and have a standard that ensures we’re looking at what’s lawful, ethical, and grounded in science.

The psychological sciences can have the same impact on improving policing as the physical science of DNA. That’s where we need to get to. We need to stop resisting change and embrace methods that are more effective.

From that General Assembly, three entities came together and formed the Coordinating Group for the universal protocol Initiative under Juan Mendez. These entities were: the Association for the Prevention of Torture in Geneva, Switzerland; the Norwegian Center for Human Rights; and, of course, Juan Mendez’s Anti-Torture Initiative. This Coordinating Group, under the umbrella of the United Nations sought a global standard, asked me to serve on a 15-person global steering committee of experts.

We spent four years looking at this—debating, traveling around the world, and talking to different countries. I went to Tunisia, Bangkok, Thailand, and Brazil as a member of the steering committee. We distilled all our discussions and debates, and after meeting monthly (and virtually after COVID), we came up with the Mendez Principles. We started with a 150-page report, but we needed something readable for a wide audience—scientists, lawyers, and practitioners. We ended up with something around 60 pages, the “Principles of Effective Interviewing,” named after Juan Mendez.

While working on this, I was also the co-editor of a volume called Interviewing and Interrogation: Interrogating Efficacy with Law and Morality. This provided the academic underpinning that supported what the Mendez Principles were saying. Even though I’m not a lawyer, I was one of the editors of that book, which was primarily written by lawyers, and practitioners. Similarly, I co-edited The Interviewing and Interrogation Volume, which was primarily written by psychologists and practitioners.

The great news is that countries are now embracing the Mendez Principles. We sent the principles to the American Bar Association, and the ABA has endorsed them. The United Nations has completely revamped their training programs for their investigators and peacekeeping forces who are often referred to as “blue hats.” A whole new manual was created based on these scientific methods. You can download the Mendez Principles at interviewingprinciples.com, available in 15 languages. They consist of six pillars, and they’re easy to understand. You can use them to guide policy, practice, and training. If you use them as a framework, you’ll have an effective program.

Another great thing is that the UN manual is available online, too. If you want to know what the UN is doing and how they’re doing it, you can view it. Regarding the Interviewing and Interrogation volume, you can also download it for free electronically. We wanted to make this available to the public because no department is going to pay for research they don’t know if they can trust. We asked the scientists to write for the layman, for people like me and others who would need to understand the research.

What I’m really excited about is that we now have a volume available free of charge, without paywalls. This project was born from the subcommittee I convened when I was chair of the IMPACT section. We asked, “Why has practice been slow to accept advancements?” A lot of it boils down to practitioners not understanding the research. There are two silos: academics and practitioners, and there’s a cost barrier to accessing research. Our goal was to get the science into the hands of practitioners so they could apply it.

There is a large volume of research that supports what is commonly known as science-based interviewing, however practitioners are often uniformed about such research. Can you talk about what Club Fed and Project Alethia is and how you are trying to bridge the gap between science and practitioners?

Let me tell you about the project, and then I’ll go to Club Fed. As an offshoot of the work I was doing with research scientists on the HIG, I spent four years as the chair of the IMPACT section of IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police), and I spent the previous four years as the vice chair. So, for eight years, I was an elected official of the IMPACT section. During those leadership positions, every year, I made sure that at least one of our workshops at the IACP conference featured research scientists presenting their findings to try to get the research out there.

What I found, however, was that although it was great and interesting, it wasn’t as relevant as I had hoped. The research scientists would go back to the research silo, and the practitioners would return to their own silo. There were paywalls in the way, and neither group truly understood what the other was doing. The research wasn’t being assimilated into practice. When I talked to research scientists, they mentioned the costs of joining IACP or attending the conference, and how they had no guarantee of being selected as a presenter. Their universities wouldn’t fund them if they weren’t presenting, and it was hard to get a spot at the conference. On the other hand, practitioners would never attend a research conference, let alone mingle with people who don’t kick in doors or carry badges and guns. There’s a different culture, and that costs money, too.

You wouldn’t issue a weapon (to police officers) that haphazardly misfires and hits unintended targets, so why would you do the same with your interview programs?

This gap needed to be bridged, so I co-founded Project Alethia. The goal was to create a space where both practitioners who want to learn about science and scientists who want to learn about practice could engage with each other—for free. This initiative aimed to break down the barrier between the two worlds. Taking lessons from my research dissemination reports at the HIG, we started asking practitioners to reflect on their careers and write reports so other practitioners could learn. We also asked scientists to write state-of-the-science reports in a way that practitioners could understand, which would also be available for free on Project Alethia.

I co-founded the project with Dr. Mary Hartwig, but I’m no longer the co-director, and now serve as Director-Emeritus. Project Alethia has become an excellent resource that people can use to engage and interact. You can contact research scientists directly, have conversations, exchange information, and learn from each other. It’s a great resource for culturally assimilating these two different communities.

Now, I’m really excited about a recent strategic partnership Club Fed has entered into with WSI Technologies and a company called iRecord. They have an incredible interrogation room suite, and this partnership is ensuring that we are recording interrogations correctly. Let me explain. When I testify for state legislators about recording interrogations, inevitably someone—be it a senator, representative, or other official—will say, “Oh, we all carry cell phones, it’s easy to record.” I have to tell them, “No, no, that’s not how you should record evidence.” If you’re going to record interrogations, you have to do it the right way, in a way that preserves evidence.

iRecord is an incredible company with an excellent product because it’s interoperable. A supervisor can sit in their office and monitor an interrogation remotely, instead of being confined to that small, dark room with the one-way mirror. For example, if I had this technology when I was on the CITF task force, we could have had behavioral scientists sitting at our headquarters in Washington, D.C., watching an interrogation in Guantanamo and providing input. In a white-collar crime case, we could have someone sitting remotely, like an expert in cost accounting, watching, and giving feedback on the interrogation. You could make the footage available to the prosecutor, disseminate it easily, and much more.

Policing needs to improve its practices, and to do that, they need to embrace science. We talk about evidence-based policing, constitutional policing, and ethical policing, but none of that can happen if we’re still promoting deceptive and counterproductive practices.

What we’re doing now is going around, and they are helping me promote science-based methods to improve the practice of interviewing. I’m helping their community understand the science, and they’re bringing me to speak at conferences about how we can use technology to improve interrogation practices. I’m really excited about where we’re headed with that. Just a few weeks ago, I was at their headquarters, where we put together trauma kits to donate to police departments, among other things. It’s an incredible company with incredible leadership, and their motto is “Connect and Protect.” That’s what we’re hoping to do together.

If you had to give advice to a local police detective about to sit down for an interview with a suspect who had been arrested for a serious crime, what would your advice be to the detective on how to approach the interview?

I think the first thing to recognize is that the person you’re interviewing has all the power. They are in control of their mind and what information they allow to be revealed, as well as how much of that information they are willing to give you. Your job isn’t to talk to them; your job is to listen to them. Sometimes people say, “Yeah, you talk to people for a living,” and I correct them by saying, “No, actually, what I do is listen to people for a living.”

So, I think the first thing you need to do is recognize that you’re the collector. If you were to talk to someone in computers, they’d say everything is either a one or a zero. Well, as an interviewer, you’re looking for those ones and zeros. You want to maximize the amount of information you get, and the way you do that is what I call the trust dividend. The more you build trust, the more the person will be willing to share. Your job is to create an atmosphere where the person gives up as much information as they’re willing to. You need to present conditions that evokes information, not provoke it.

I would advise interviewers to take a few breaths and put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re interviewing. When we were doing the USS Cole investigations in Yemen, we used to say, “Put yourself in their sandals.” Put yourself in their position. Recognize that you’re there to listen.

You can download the Mendez Principles at interviewingprinciples.com, available in 15 languages. They consist of six pillars, and they’re easy to understand. You can use them to guide policy, practice, and training. If you use them as a framework, you’ll have an effective program.

We talk a lot about active listening, but I say take it a step further—this is about devoted listening. When you go into that room, you need to be devoted to that person. You need to have them understand true empathy. Beyond rapport, this is a relationship you’re engaging in. By creating an atmosphere of trust, information will flow easier. As the trust dividend grows and the relationship develops, you can engage more deeply and get to the questions that you need answered.

When you go into an interview, at least if you’re taught by me, you need to know what your collection requirements are. What is it you’re trying to get from that interview? What outcome are you expecting? What are the things you need to know? In counterintelligence, we call them collection requirements. They are the key things you need to know as a collector. So, when you go into the interview, keep those in mind, but remember that you’re the collector, the receptor. How you apply it might be evidence, intelligence, or general knowledge, but your goal isn’t to get a confession. Your goal is to get information.