Benjamin Lim & The Reid Technique.

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Why Are K-12 School Leaders Being Trained in Coercive Interrogation Techniques?

As the Guardian noted last year and the New Yorker discussed recently, school administrators are increasingly being trained as interrogators to extract confessions from students for so-called "crimes"—most often, minor offenses from schoolyard scuffles to insubordination. Instruction in the interrogation arts is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, a global interrogation training firm that contracts with police departments, armed services divisions and security companies around the country. According to the New Yorker, the company has taught its patented “Reid Technique” to hundreds of school administrators in eight states. That training may be leading to an increasing number of students 'fessing up, even when they have nothing to confess to.

As the New Yorker notes, “like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid’s workbook, ‘to obtain an admission of guilt.’”

Reid’s methods are built on what Bloomberg writer Drake Bennett calls “the twin poles of interrogation styles: ‘minimization’ and ‘maximization.'"

Forms of coercion that correspond, roughly, to “good cop, bad cop.” Minimization plays down the significance of the crime and offers potential excuses for it—“you just meant to scare her” or “anyone in your situation would have done the same thing.” Maximization plays it up, confrontationally presenting incriminating evidence and refusing to allow any response except a confession. The two are the most widely used tools in the American police interrogator toolkit.

The New Yorker spoke with Jessica Schneider, an attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who attended one of Reid’s educator-focused training sessions early last year. The instruction included a run-down of telltale body language signs indicating a student—or as they were referred to in the session, suspect or subject—is lying.

Many of these purported indicators can be found in Reid’s Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. The list includes “closed, retreated posture” (“crossed arms...reflect decreased confidence or lack of emotional involvement”), “constant forward lean” (“a controlling and defensive posture”) and “frozen and static” (“the subject who is so intent on not incriminating themselves...may, essentially ‘shut down’ nonverbally”). Interrogators are cautioned to look for poker-like deception “tells”—hand wringing, scratching, wiping sweat, knuckle popping. An anxious liar, according to the Reid Technique, is a squirmy liar.

One of the many problems with this approach is that it’s notoriously fallible. Typically nervous behaviors are not surefire indicators of guilt, mostly because there’s no universal litmus test for lying. Bennett points to a 2003 study from the Universities of Virginia and Missouri-Columbia which found that many of the behaviors associated with lying don’t necessarily tell us anything at all. “Behavioral cues that are discernible by human perceivers are associated with deceit only probabilistically,” researchers wrote. “To establish definitively that someone is lying, further evidence is needed.”

In other words, there is no definitive liar’s pose. TV police procedurals and cop movies get it wrong all the time, and when they expect similar results, so do real-life interrogators.

Minimization and maximization interrogation methods, like those used by Reid and others, are good at yielding confessions. But an increasing number of experts suggest that in far too many cases, those confessions are false, resulting from a blend of fear and coercion. Psychologist Melissa Russano devised a study that found the Reid Technique often produces false admissions of wrongdoing in innocent subjects. “Guilty people are more likely to confess,” Russano told Bennett. “The problem is, so are innocent people.”

That was certainly true in the case of Juan A. Rivera, who in 1993 was convicted to life in jail for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. After serving 20 years for a crime he didn’t commit, Rivera sued a number of law enforcement agencies and other organizations for $20 million, a figure he was granted in an out-of-court settlement. John E. Reid and Associates paid $2 million of that sum. The false confessions of the Central Park Five, who were all teenagers at the time of their arrests, were also likely obtained using Reid-derived methods. It’s no wonder the U.S. Supreme Court has written that “mounting empirical evidence” proves that certain forms of interrogation “can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they never committed.”

Another glaring issue is that children and adolescents are often easily influenced and compliant toward authority figures. They’re easy to intimidate and coerce, and often prioritize immediate rewards (having the interrogation end; getting to go home) over future penalties (suspension/expulsion/etc.)

http://www.alternet.org/education/wh...ion-techniques


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