#effective inevstigation

[scripttorture]

Effective investigation: strategies that actually work

In modern popular culture torture is consistently linked to interrogation: to getting information from a prisoner.

 Now I’ve written several times why this trope is not only wrong but also harmful and is used in the real world to justify torture. O��Mara and Rejali also cover this in depth over several hundred pages for anyone who wants more information.

 I often get asked for realistic alternatives: what does actually work? How can characters, bad or good, actually go about gaining information in a realistic way?

 This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list, and I feel I should state that I have no practical experience of interrogation. Hopefully though it can serve as a starting point that will help you think about how characters come by information in your stories.

 The first important point is that interrogation generally isn’t very effective.

 Very little useful information comes from interrogation of suspects when compared to all the other sources of information police and intelligence agencies draw on.

 There are a several reasons interrogation isn’t hugely useful including:

·         Human memory isn’t that good. Even well meaning people who want to help forget important details.

·         People are much better at lying than detecting lies. Even people who describe themselves as good at detecting when someone is lying do a very poor job.

·         Memories are easily modified in stressful situations. Even someone who isn’t trying to can plant suggestions leading to false memories, directing the interrogation in a particular direction without even realising it.

 Some useful information does come from interrogation (and I’ll come back to how to handle it in a moment) but, realistically the following are more important sources of information in any investigation:

 Physical forensic evidence

 This doesn’t just mean things like hair samples and DNA. Computer records, credit card bills, surveillance camera footage, library records and letters can tell you an awful lot about a person. Reading a character’s emails or letters and keeping track of their bills can reveal a lot of plot relevant information such as whether two characters are in contact or why a character might be desperate for money.

 Gathering this sort of information takes a lot of time and hard work. It’s not as simple as collecting evidence, such as a piece of hair or a computer hard drive, the information has to be analysed and interpreted correctly.

 The hair could be DNA tested and cross referenced with a database or simply identified as human and of a particular type and colour. (Identifying it as human is important, I know at least one forensic tech who was handed cow hair and told it was definitely from a suspect)

 The computer hard drive would need to be poured over file by file. It’s not quite enough to suppose character A could access character B’s emails, A has to have the time and inclination to read the damn things.

 An important point to consider is how dedicated your characters are. Careful collection and examination of evidence is probably the best way of finding something out. But it requires patience, hard work and a lot of time.

 There’s a reason police work is a full time job and there’s a reason a lot of people in professions like policing might think torture is easier. Gathering and analysing evidence is hard.

 It’s worth considering whether your character has the resources and inclination to go down this route before you decide to use it.

 Observation

 This is the stake-out scene from every police movie and tv show. It’s having one character physically following and watching another character for as long as humanly possible, recording everywhere they go and everything they do.

 It means finding out where a character lives, watching them at work, noting where they eat lunch and who with. Finding out where they go in their free time and how often. When they go to bed. Who they visit. How long they do it for. The minute detail of everything someone does in their day recorded for a period of weeks or months to build up a picture of the person.

 If that sounds creepy that’s because it is.

 This is a very time consuming strategy. It requires a lot of focus and patience and dedication or the ability to hire someone who has those qualities. It’s simpler than systematically gathering physical evidence and it’s easier to do discretely.

 Informants

 This is probably the simplest major method of gathering information. It can be as complicated as the Soviet Union network of paid informants or as straight-forward as people coming forward and volunteering information.

 This is incredibly important to police investigations. Information from voluntary informants led to the capture of the London tube bombers in 2005. The suspects were identified by their family and neighbours who went to the police.

 This sort of informal reporting doesn’t just occur in police contexts. From a writing perspective the way I tend to think about it is in terms of crossing societal lines.

 Every culture and subculture has ideas about what is and what is not acceptable. Every group has an idea of what’s ‘going too far’.

 You might be writing a story set around a violent, criminal subculture where theft and murder of other adults are the norm. But the same characters who wouldn’t dream of reporting an enemy for killing another adult might feel differently about the murder of a child.

 A religious character might excuse their priest’s affairs, but report anything they’d see as desecration or blasphemy.

 A scientist might ignore a colleague harassing their lab assistants but report data fraud.

 Think about what matters to the characters and you’ll be able to tell when they’d freely volunteer information.

 If you can’t think of anything emotional that would cause them to inform remember that your characters could pay informants. And then consider how many people who really need some cash might be in a position to watch or steal from other characters.

 Cleaners, drivers, people who deliver supplies- anyone who would be on a low wage, have regular contact with the character but only a superficial relationship could be a very valuable informant.

 Interrogation

 At the time of writing there is really not enough systematic research on effective interrogation. As a result I’m going to try and concentrate on things we’re reasonably sure help rather than getting bogged down in academic discussions about what might be useful. Those discussions are interesting but not much help to writers.

 1)      The first important point is that interrogation takes time.

 If a character is volunteering information that probably won’t take as long but somewhere in the region of 3-6 hours would still be reasonable. A witness to a crime or victim would probably need time and reassurance in order to tell the authorities what they know to the best of their ability.

 Someone who isn’t really willing to talk (for whatever reason) will need much longer. A day is actually unusually short. Weeks or even up to a month is not unreasonable. Timeframes are going to vary depending on the characters and the situation the plot has put them in but I think it’s important to remember that interrogation isn’t quick and it isn’t simple.

 2)      Interrogators and characters being interrogated should speak a common language.

 It sounds simple and obvious but if the characters can’t communicate effectively interrogation is almost certainly going to fail.

 Using translators does not seem to be as effective as using people who speak the language but there haven’t been systematic studies of speakers vs interpreters as far as I know.

 3)      Good record keeping is essential for effective interrogation.

 That’s straightforward in a modern setting with recording equipment but less so in a historical one.

 Having a record of everything the suspect character says when interviewed means that everything they say can be analysed by multiple people, can be cross checked against what they said previously and can be stored in a legible format in case it’s needed later.

 Checking what a suspect character said today against what they said yesterday or even last week helps investigators to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Lies are difficult to keep consistent, especially over longer periods of time. Inconsistencies can be helpful and consistencies can help highlight areas investigators should look into in greater depth.

 Having multiple people able to analyse information also helps hugely, each individual brings their own specialist knowledge to the investigation. Which can be as simple as recognising a local’s nickname (and so correctly identifying them later) or as complex as analysing how a suspect claims they made a bomb and recognising that that process wouldn’t work.

 4)      Even someone who genuinely wants to help will forget details and get things wrong.

 That isn’t unusual and it certainly isn’t a sign that the character is unwilling or being deliberately unhelpful. In fact a story that sounds too detailed and too precise might well be a sign of a pre-scripted and pre-rehearsed lie.

 5)      Very very few people refuse to talk.

 Whether they talk about anything helpful is of course another matter but the stereotype of a tough criminal sitting completely silently and staring down a cop is incredibly rare in reality.

 A smart interrogator will try to get their suspect chatting in the hope that some useful information will come out.

 Let’s say one of our characters is suspected of being part of a larger conspiracy of some kind. And he won’t chat about any of the ‘interesting’ material the cops have found in his house, but he’s happy to talk to the interrogator about the local football team.

 The interrogator might notice that he seems to go to watch the local team regularly and that he goes with the same set of friends. Friends who might not be part of this conspiracy but might have heard something useful from the suspect.

 A smart suspect will try to keep up a conversation peppered with misleading hints and misinformation.

 6)      Have the interrogating character establish a friendly rapport with their interviewee.

It is easier to talk to someone who comes across as friendly, interested in what you have to say and broadly sympathetic to your position.

 It is much more difficult to talk to someone who shouts, screams and acts in an aggressive and confrontational manner.

 The interrogator’s job is primarily to make it easy for the suspect to talk. Everything else follows from that.

 A polite, engaging, sociable character who can keep calm under pressure would be a good pick. Someone who can be ‘friends’ with anybody.

 Let me stress that this can be extremely difficult. We’re talking about a character who can walk into a room with the worst possible criminals and try to make friends with them; a character who is successful at doing so. Don’t be afraid to show the kind of toll that takes on the character.

 7)      Don’t let suspects talk to each other before hand.

 I’ve discussed elsewhere why solitary confinement is harmful- keeping characters completely isolated might well impair their memory of events.

 But allowing characters to talk to each other before their interrogated also affects memory both for characters who want to mislead interrogators and for characters who want to help.

 Essentially we edit our memories all the time. Discussion of shared experiences with other people is a major trigger for natural alternation of memories.

 Four witnesses of the same events who don’t talk to each other in advance will give four different but broadly similar accounts.

 If the same witnesses talk to each other before they’re interviewed they might well all report the same inaccuracies.

 8)      Have interviewed characters tell their story backwards.

 This is a pretty simple memory aid that makes it easier for interrogators to spot inconsistencies in a story. These inconsistencies don’t necessarily indicate a lie but they highlight areas a character might be unsure of or might have inaccurate memories of.

 For instance if a character witnessed a car crash they might be instructed to start their account from the moment the ambulances arrived at the scene and work backwards from there until they reach the moments just before the crash.

 This technique can also help remind characters of additional details as they tell the story.

 9)      There is no reliable way to tell if someone is lying by looking at them.

 Even people who judge themselves as ‘good’ at detecting lies perform poorly in tests.

 There are no reliable ‘tests’ for lying. There are no working lie detector tests and based on how complex an action lying is short of literally reading minds I don’t think it would be possible.

 The only reliable way to tell if someone lied is to double check everything they said.

 10)  Body language is not a reliable indicator of a character’s guilt or innocence.

 A lot of people still believe that it is and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with your characters believing that- but I’d advise caution.

 An interrogator character might recognise that a suspect character is nervous, but to instantly ‘know’ why they’d need to be psychic.

  The vast majority of people who conduct interrogations in real life have little to no formal training. In the USA (2013) the average was between 8-15 hours of the full training program. Consider how many hours you’d spend on a year long full time education course and you’ll get an idea of how little training that is.

 We are what fills in the gap.

 People with almost no training look to our portrayals of tough, aggressive interrogators who ‘always’ get results and, consciously or not, those portrayals influence them.

 The truth is interrogation isn’t a great way of getting information and interrogators are only human: they don’t have a supernatural insight into the suspect or crime.

 But we tend to write them as if they do. Personally I think that’s part of the problem- We focus on interrogation because of its dramatic potential. That focus warps how both the public and people involved in investigations view interrogation. It places too much focus on a comparatively poor information gathering technique and leads to assumptions that interrogators are capable of more than they realistically are.

 Trust, human interaction and treating other people as human is important. Anything that undermines that undermines interrogation.

Edit: Since I’m seeing some response in the comments from people who don’t quite see how bad portrayals of torture in fiction can affect real life, I’m linking back to this older Masterpost-  Accurate Portrayals of Torture in Fiction are Important

Disclaimer

[Sources: Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation. Harvard University Press, S O’Mara

Torture and Democracy, Princeton, D Rejali

The work of E Alison and L Alison, discussed in this newspaper article and listed here on their University home page papers are behind a pay wall (one specific to interviewing terrorists can be found here).

New Scientist 2015, article on evidence based policing]