 | First Responders and Statementsposted by Wesley Clark, Group AdministratorSaturday, February 26th 2011 @ 6:24 PM |
Within the law enforcement community officers have to take many mandatory training classes to keep up their basic skills and certifications, such as firearms training, defensive tactics, domestic violence issues and workplace violence to name a few. This is across the board and everyone gets the training, whether we like it or not.
The better, or rather, more interesting training classes, such as Interview and Interrogation, Statement Analysis, Psychological Profiling and such are far and few between, and most often, they are assigned to the detectives who deal with those specific issues on a daily basis.
We understand this, as frustrating as it is for many officers, because we know there are only so many seats in class, and only so many officers from one department can go because department training budgets are tight, so we realize that the ones who should be there are the ones who need the training the most and deal with those specific issues. With many of the training classes there are no real negative to that, maybe some disappointment and bruise egos is all, but when it comes to Investigative Statement Analysis, there is more of an issue when this happens.
Investigative Statement Analysis is one of those training classes that detectives are more frequently assigned to attend because they investigate more serious crimes and spend most of their time talking with victims, screening witnesses, conducting investigative interviews as well as engaging in criminal interrogations. This is great because the detectives improve their skills and learn new and very effective ways to obtain written statements from people without contaminating or influencing the content of the information. They can then use the language to probe for more information, look for areas where they may be missing information and make accurate assessments of deception as well as truthfulness regarding the content of the statements. This training certainly adds to their “investigative tool belt” and helps to accurately close cases.
The problem that arises, and I have heard this from several former students as well as my personal experience in the field, is that if first responders are unaware of what Statement Analysis is, and how to obtain a written statement or question people without contaminating their response and the information, they are more likely to adversely affect the information before the detectives even get assigned to the case for follow up investigation. Now when the detectives do get the written statements, they are frequently written by the police officer or taken in a manner that is not conducive to obtaining accurate, reliable information, never mind being adequate to assess the information for veracity.
If a detective does receive training in Statement Analysis, it would be a great idea for he or she to conduct some in-service training upon returning to their department geared towards the first responders to let them know how to obtain statements and information from people in the field without inadvertently contaminating the information. I know this can be difficult, since police work is 24-7-365, and finding the time to get to everyone is almost impossible.
One of my suggestions has been for many years is to have some of those "mandatory" yearly training classes that we all have to take include some basic information on Statement Analysis and conducting effective interviews in the field for first responders. Unfortunately, since I have been pounding that drum for many years, I don't see things changing all that soon. Hopefully some of the detectives taking the training classes on Statement Analysis will be able to conduct in-service training or maybe even sell their administration on the value of department-wide basic understanding of Statement Analysis techniques.
Knowing the value of this, at LIES we have designed a 1-day Statement Analysis training class that is geared for patrol and first responders, so if your department is interested, send them our contact information and we will be glad to provide the training!
