Police should abandon their longstanding approach to interrogating suspects because it is too prone to inducing false confessions, an influential police training company now says.
The dominant school of thought on interrogation tactics since the 1960s, distilled into a manual known as the Reid Technique, holds that detectives should relentlessly cajole their suspects toward their own set theory of the crime in question.
The tactic should be familiar to anyone who’s watched fictional cops on TV in the past few decades: Close-quarters confrontations between an investigator who’s sure he knows what happened and a suspect who insists he’s innocent.
The Reid Technique is more complicated and nuanced than that common portrayal, but the core idea is to keep steering a suspect back toward the version of the story the cop believes, in which the person talking to them is guilty. It is a theory of interrogation that presumes the investigator has made no mistakes and can pressure their chosen perpetrator into a confession to match the investigator’s narrative.
But the police consulting firm Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, which has helped train more than 90 law enforcement agencies across 29 states, announced Monday it will drop the technique from its curriculum.
“Rather than primarily seeking a confession, it’s an important goal for investigators to find the truth ethically through a respectful, non-confrontational approach,” President and CEO Shane Sturman said in a press release announcing the move. From now on, Sturman’s staff “will only discuss the Reid Method in effort to highlight potential risks posed in obtaining a false confession.”
The sweatbox approach to scoring confessions reflects an old belief that no innocent person would ever confess to a crime under any circumstances. If someone cracked under interrogation and started agreeing with detectives who say he stole that purse or killed that janitor, the Marshall Project’s Eli Hager notes, then the rest of the justice system would treat it as “an absolute sign of guilt.”
But false confessions are commonplace. Of all falsely convicted Americans exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, Wicklander-Zulawski’s release says, a full 29 percent had confessed their guilt under interrogation.
This should not be surprising given the prevalence of Reid Method practices. After trying and failing for hours to convince police that you’re not the guy they’re looking for, with officers making it clear that the only thing you can do to help yourself is say they’re right about your guilt, a false confession can begin to look like a rational move to anyone. Think of the Central Park Five — teenagers who were coerced into false confessions after 30-hour interrogations and served a combined 41 years in prison for a brutal rape they did not commit — who were back in the news last fall, thanks to then-candidate Donald Trump insisting they’re probably still guilty.
The risks increase when the suspect is of diminished mental capacity or has not insisted that a lawyer or parent be present for the conversation. Think of Netflix’s Making A Murderer and the excruciating videotapes of officers in Wisconsin grinding a confession out of mentally challenged teenager Brendan Dassey. After hours of resistance, Dassey finally gives in and tells the officers what they want to hear — and then looks up and asks if he can go home now to watch Wrestlemania, having just “confessed” to a brutal murder.
The Reid Technique’s defenders argue that such interrogations misuse their teachings. But at some point, it isn’t good enough to blame the students for abusing the curriculum. The teachings themselves have to change or the results never will.
For Wicklander-Zulawski, that point is now. Yet while the firm is abandoning the Reid style of interrogation training, it’s not immediately clear that its replacement will be better.
The firm will now primarily teach an approach it developed in-house — but the “W-Z Method” is a derivative of the Reid Technique itself. While it “is defined as non-confrontational” in contrast with its predecessor, criminologist and Colorado Parole Board member Brandon Mathews wrote in a 2015 paper, its core components are “Obtaining the Admission” and “Developing the Admission.” In other words, the company is still training investigators to score confessions — just with a sunnier disposition and a slightly more open mind.
The idea of badgering and tricking people into confessing to things was initially heralded as progress, Hager notes, as polygraph expert John Reid created it in in the mid-20th century in hopes of “replacing the beatings that police frequently used to elicit information” in the polygraphist’s day.
With an influential consulting firm now abandoning the Reid Technique decades later because of its propensity to induce false confessions, the evolution Reid himself sought to trigger in interrogation practices is advancing. But, as the high rate of false confessions linked to Reid’s technique shows, the police industry tends to inflict new forms of harm when it attempts to correct existing deficiencies.
It will likely be years before Wicklander-Zulawski’s thinking takes full root across the police training business, if history is any guide. In the past, major upheavals in interrogation practices have taken decades to spread through the law enforcement world. Reid’s own manual for interrogations was published more than 30 years after a government commission first put a media spotlight on the routine “third degree” violence police employed against suspects.
However long it ends up taking, something new will eventually take the Reid Technique’s place. Exonerations data and academic research have bruised the technique’s reputation for years now. But as Reid’s own story suggests, no one should assume whatever comes next will be a solution. It is more likely that the next police fad in skirting due process rights will contain new and different injustices.