Even if you are not Irish, a little luck falls upon most people every now and then. Although I firmly believe that hard work trumps luck any day of the week, we all appreciate a nice break once in a while! Just make sure you don't live your life relying on luck to get by, or you may find yourself hanging out in casinos and investing in lottery tickets and scratch-off games, or maybe believing that you do have a long-lost Nigerian relative who is a prince and wants to leave you $350,000,000 million dollars! (By the way, if you believe you have a rich Nigerian Prince as a relative, I have a bridge I would like to sell you, click here)

One place you should never rely on luck is in the interview room. As a professional interviewer you should not "wing-it" when it comes to gathering information from a victims, witnesses or suspects. Rather than luck, you need a solid foundation of training that is supported by academic research. However, your training doesn't end there. You should spend time reading, researching, studying and taking training courses to constantly develop your skills and techniques surrounding interviewing and interrogation, detecting deception, memory, communication, personality assessment, interpersonal relations, public speaking, emotions and emotion recognition, and on and on. Anything that can give you an edge and bring up your skills should be on your radar and scheduled into your calendar. When you look at a professional athlete, whether in baseball, basketball, football, hockey or any other sport, they aren't lucky to be on top of their game, they spent a lot of time practicing, training and preparing. Luck had little if anything to do with it. As the say goes, luck favors the prepared mind! So prepare!

I read an article in an FBI Bulletin on "Intuitive Policing: Emotional/Rational Decision Making in Law Enforcement." The authors discuss instances where police officers act or react to a situation without knowing exactly why they did what they did, but in hindsight their actions were accurate. They provided an example of an officer doing a buy-bust operation for narcotics sales on the street and how the officer identified a particular individual as having a gun, without seeing one or having information he was carrying one. He just felt he was carrying a gun and was unable to articulate why he felt that way until after the incident while writing his report. Subtle details such as the individual had a long sleeve shirt pulled out over his pants on a very warm day, he got up from the curb and adjusted his waistband, and he turned away from the officer and began walking away and grabbed the right side of his waistband as if securing some object. These observations were made so rapidly the officer was not able to say exactly what he saw, only state his conclusion that the individual was carrying a gun, which was correct...he had a .357 revolver in his waistband. After the stress of the incident was over, thinking back on the incident he was able to accurately recall details which led him to his belief the guy was carrying a weapon. It was a pre-conscious recognition of danger, and the authors discuss on a neurological level how this occurs. In my experience, this occurs in assessments of veracity as well, such as in situations where an officer hears a story from an individual or reads a victims statement and has this intuitive feeling that something is wrong. They may not know why they feel that way, but they know that something is just not right with this story or statement. Investigative Statement Analysis brings to light WHY the officer or investigator feels that way, and through training they can effectively identify and address it.

After 3 days of harsh interrogation which included being hooded and held in stress positions, this individual, a suspected arms dealer, did not provide any information or intelligence to the people questioning him (I don’t even want to call them “interrogators”). It wasn’t until an actual, professional interrogator took over the questioning process that information was developed, in 3 hours…not 3 days! This suspect admitted to selling weapons to insurgents and told the interrogator where his stash of weapons was as well as where another arms dealer kept his weapons too. To read more, click HERE. Rapport, respect, trust, etc should not be considered “soft” skills, but rather powerful weapons in pursuit of the truth if developed and used properly.

One thing to keep in mind about Investigative Statement Analysis is that it’s not just for identifying deception. I know that may be obvious to some people reading this, but it seems that there are people, including investigators, who have lost sight of this. It is important to calibrate yourself, or recalibrate, to a neutral and objective zone when analyzing language. Staying neutral and objective will give you the best results when applying principles of statement analysis and help you avoid confirmation bias. This dangerous mindset can occur within statement analysis as well, in that you only look for indicators of possible deception within language and dismiss, or miss altogether, indicators consistent with truthfulness. Throughout my years as a detective and sergeant within the Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad, I have had a lot of success with using investigative statement analysis in identifying deception and securing accurate and reliable confessions from people. I have also had a lot of success using these same principles to prove the reliability of written statements when other people were doubting their veracity, including victims of kidnappings, robberies and sexual assaults, as well as suspects accused of sexual assaults, theft and other crimes too. Investigative statement analysis is a powerful tool when used properly, but as with anything, it can lead an investigator astray if used inappropriately.