And I’m sure she did nothing wrong, she told no lies, and they didn’t tell her what lie they “caught”, and there was no follow-up investigation on the “lie”. It’s all theater.
In this case it lets the police pretend that their organization is very exclusive, honest, and capable of detecting lies. This reputational enhancement is worth more to the police than the cost of occasionally not hiring a nervous false positive (applies to many employers, by the way).
Polygraphs should be outlawed period, not just for law enforcement investigations, but for workplace investigations, or any other sort of investigation.
I think there’s a phenomenon where people do their jobs for a long time, and confirmation bias leads them to believe certain techniques or skills are more powerful than they really are. All it would really take is catching a perpetrator in a lie a few times, and then they come to believe they know how to catch people in lies, their brain conveniently ignoring all the times this technique failed. I see it a lot in the mental health profession also.
I think the public wants to believe that justice is being done, and that telling a guilty person from a non-guilty one is as easy as reading body language or taking a polygraph. We discussed this in a different thread, I think, about how neurodiverse or disabled people may be perceived as guilty when they aren’t, because they are not making eye contact, or don’t seem all that emotional about a subject, or are behaving in some way that isn’t typical. And unfortunately a lot of people with mental disabilities get railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit. These interrogators also tend not to understand trauma, either, so they might suspect someone of lying about a rape, for example, based on them not behaving the way they imagine a rape victim should behave, or having a different recollection of events on day one vs. day seven or eight. It actually takes time for the brain to process memory, so conflicting testimony is not necessarily indicative of guilt the way many assume it is. It’s generally just a bad idea to depend on any of these “techniques,” IMO.
Refusing to talk to the police and answer their questions is also seen as a sign of guilt even though you should never do it unless compelled and with a lawyer next to you but, such is the state of law enforcement.
Because a large number of people being questioned are, in fact, guilty. And not master criminals.
The trouble comes when people somehow decide that confessing to a crime they know they didn’t do is a good idea. That also happens a surprisingly large number of times.
Perhaps most memorably with the Central Park Five false confessions.
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. But when you’re in that interrogation room, everything changes. During the hours of relentless questioning that we each endured, detectives lied to us repeatedly. They said they had matched our fingerprints to crime scene evidence and told each of us that the others had confessed and implicated us in the attack. They said that if we just admitted to participating in the attack, we could go home. All of these were blatant lies.
With these tactics of deception and intimidation, detectives sought to exhaust, disorient and confuse us. They hoped to make us so fearful of never seeing our loved ones again that we’d say anything to protect ourselves and our families. Ultimately, that’s what nearly all of us did. - SOURCE
I also think it should be illegal for police to lie to people they are interrogating. A lot of this stuff disproportionately impacts people with mental disabilities.
In Arizona I’m familiar with the “Temple Murder case”, where not only did four kids confess to a murder they didn’t do, but when the right people were convicted, the stupid-assed prosecutor STILL thought the four were guilty.
The investigation led to the ouster of Sheriff Tom Agnos, which was good, but got Joe Arpaio elected, which was BAD.
Because of these two cases, I look at Law and Order interrogations in a new, cynical light. I hate it when I see Lennie dong the same thing.
Watch Interrogation Raw.
I was down with it. Oh, man. Good ol’ Police get them bad guys off the street. You go!
Until…they had this old creepy looking dude. He was accused of exposing himself in a Walmart. I think they had store surveillance video of it.
A woman detective went berserk on him. She called that man every kinda pervert imaginable, cussing and screaming. Finally she just stormed out of the room and the ‘good cop’ guy took over.
I know the creeper was gross and guilty of exposing himself. Bad enough.
Ultimately he was just charged with that and put on probation and trespassed at that store.
The woman detective obviously had other reasons to be upset. She was furious.
Because body language isn’t evidence. It’s just a hint as to where to look for more evidence that you can actually use. Police can certainly boast how good they are at reading body language, but if that body language doesn’t lead them to actual evidence, it’s completely useless.
Plus, a TV show doesn’t show you all the misses. You’re watching for the satisfaction of seeing a perp get busted. It’s not very entertaining to watch a detective saying “man, I spent all day digging in the landfill because a suspect crossed his arms funny during interrogation. Maybe body language isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
I recall from The Americans that the CIA/Soviet use was not because it was remotely reliable, but that (for example) the technician would pretend to detect something at some critical point and ask the subject to “clarify”, with the implication that the machine was maybe detecting lying but they could be off the hook if they explained more. Just a trick to try to catch the subject out, get them to say more or maybe contradict themselves on a critical question. The woman who was being trained to beat the test was instructed that on no account should she “clarify” anything.
In other words, any value as an interrogation tool was to leverage the fact that an inexpert subject thought it worked, or was intimidated and uncertain if maybe it worked a little bit.
I’ve no idea if that plot point was an accurate reflection of the historical reality, or whether the CIA did have misplaced faith in these tests at some point.
So why does the FBI and CIA use polygraphs (do they still?) on their employees when not only are they unreliable, but they’re being used on the people most likely to know how to “beat” the machine?
(unless they use it the other way. The person that doesn’t react, that has the perfectly flat readings, is the mole! Ah ha!)
This was my experience, more or less. They’d ask some incredibly broad question likely to get a partial hit, like “have you ever been less than honest with an authority figure?” Probably most of us are aware of at least a “harmless” omission, but we’ll keep things simple and say “no”. The interrogator then goes back to that question, says “there seems to be some conflict here, can you clarify?” And I’m like “fine, I’ll clarify, it was me whole stole the pencils in 9th grade”.
Then they return to other questions, but with totally different shading like “were you dishonest on this question as you were on the previous quesion? Can you clarify that dishonesty?” Then by that point you’re anxious, a little confused, you want to tell a coherent story and not look like a liar, but you can’t keep all the little omissions and elisions straight, so you tell a more complete story. And oh boy do they love that part - “oh NOW you want to be honest? how do I know you’re being honest when you’ve already lied to me.”
So yeah, exactly as you said. You have to enter it with a very strong sense of what details you’ll go into, and what details you won’t go into. Never clarify, never get rattled by “hmmm, there seem to be some irregularities or conflict”. Remember, you’re not the liar, the interrogator is doing 10x more lying than you are.
That is an excellent question, but they do. Mostly in pre-employment screenings, so those people don’t know how to beat the machine, hopefully. Millions of your tax dollars go down this rathole every year where palm readings would be cheaper and about as accurate. Okay, I concede- not palmistry phrenology.
I used to go to a gym at work, and the guy who worked there was a real straight arrow. Extremely anti-drugs. His dream was to join the FBI, but he was told his lie detector test showed he’d lied about taking drugs. Maybe they just didn’t believe him, but it made me distrust lie detectors, too. We had gotten to be good friends, and I knew as well as anyone could that he had never tried drugs.
He was very bitter about it years later. But I did wonder if maybe it was their excuse because he didn’t fit their stereotype of an FBI agent, because he was Japanese-American. This was around the same time that the FBI was sued by a Black agent who alleged discrimination. Interestingly, I knew him, too. We went to the same elementary school.
