KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Police interrogations in this country have long been designed to make suspects sweat. In the early 1900s, they might be hit or dangled out of a window, tortured. It was a technique called the third degree. Then in the '60s came the Reid technique, which is what most of us know today. It's on cop shows - right? - and in real police departments.
Now police are experimenting with a new, kinder, more gentle technique. Investigative journalist Robert Kolker has written about this for Wired magazine. His piece "Nothing But The Truth" was published in collaboration with The Marshall Project, and he's with us now. Thanks for coming on the show today.
ROBERT KOLKER: Thank you.
MCEVERS: So your piece starts with what ended up being a police test case for this new technique. It's the case of a man named Hervey Medellin. His severed head was actually found near the Hollywood sign here in LA. His boyfriend at the time was a suspect in the murder. How did police interrogate the boyfriend at the time?
KOLKER: They brought him in for interviews and interrogations, and they tried to go the traditional route. But he clammed up immediately and really didn't say much of anything. And the thing about the right to remain silent is that if you do remain silent, the police have very little to go on.
MCEVERS: What has been shown to be wrong with the Reid technique over the years?
KOLKER: Well, there are a couple of problems with a guilt-presumptive process. One is - and like in this case - it gets people to clam up. And other times, it creates tunnel vision in police officers. And we see that in the highly publicized false confession cases that we've seen ever since DNA evidence has exonerated people for the last 20 years or so.
MCEVERS: So now there's this new technique. It actually started in the Obama administration. It's called the HIG, which is an acronym, of course. What does it stand for, and how did it come about?
KOLKER: This is the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. And it came out of the war on terror, ironically. It was a reaction to Abu Ghraib and all of the abusive, coercive interrogation technique revelations that came out in that time.
And it's based on the idea that over decades, there really has been no good, authoritative, academic research into what police interrogations work. And so the government decided to fund it. It was almost like a Marshall Plan to get more scholarship about how to create an accurate, noncoercive interrogation process.
MCEVERS: Just, if you could, explain the differences between the Reid technique and the HIG technique.
KOLKER: So if you're going in to talk to someone who you feel pretty strongly could be a suspect and you're using the Reid technique or any of the derivatives of it that have trickled into police culture over the years, your style is a little more confrontational. You say, listen; we have all the facts. We know what happened. We understand that you left work at 5 p.m. You know, we know your prints are on the knife or some such. And then you kind of create a theme of the case that then kind of puts the person in a box.
It's not physically coercive, but it's certainly psychologically - if not coercive than persuasive, and it becomes the suspect's job to sort of fight their way out of that box. And so automatically it's an oppositional process, and if you're a certain type of suspect, you clam up, and you don't say a word.
Now, if you go in and talk to the same suspect using the methods that the HIG are advocating, it barely feels like an oppositional interrogation at all. You're there to talk very, very little and to listen a lot and hopefully get the person to say so much that they end up contradicting verifiable information from other means.
MCEVERS: The setting is different, too, right? It's not this, like, windowless room, you know, with the bare table. It's a much more comfortable setting. There are windows, might be in a hotel. There are warm beverages. Is that right?
KOLKER: Right. Instead of the small, confining interrogation room with the bare lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling, they found that they're had had better luck in rooms that are large, rooms with a lot of natural light, rooms with windows, rooms with carpeting.
And then there's the warm beverage thing that you mentioned. There is some research that suggests that if you're holding a warm beverage in your hand, you tend to have a more positive opinion of the person you're talking to than if you have a cold beverage in your hand.
MCEVERS: So this brings us back to this LA murder case that you wrote about. Interrogators in the - on the first round were not able to get any information out of this prime suspect. The suspect later moved away. And then new interrogators were brought in to apply the HIG technique to this suspect. How was it different? What did they do?
KOLKER: There's a friendly phone call, you know, beforehand saying, hi, you know, we're new to this. We are taking no assumptions about the case. We just want to talk. And when they meet with him, they meet in a, you know, cozy hotel room. It doesn't look like an interrogation room. They are recording everything, but that's not apparent. It just looks like a bunch of guys talking.
Campos Martinez, the suspect, doesn't quite know exactly what to make of the situation. He is defensive at first, but they use these methods to build a rapport and to get him talking and to make him relaxed. And he ends up spending four or five hours with them, talking about his life, talking about his relationship with the victim, talking about any number of things, including factual matters that they end up being able to check against the record.
And then something really crazy happens. He starts talking about poisonous tea. He talks about herbs that he knows about that make it possible to incapacitate someone. And then he talks about what was going through his head when his boyfriend was gone. And he says things like, I could start a new life; I could start over. It gave the police more confidence to make an arrest.
MCEVERS: So they never got a confession, but they did get enough information to make an arrest. And he was then later convicted. Is that right?
KOLKER: That's right. He was convicted of murder. He's serving a sentence now. It was a very high-profile case, but it proceeded in a very untraditional way where a new kind of police work was used in order to close it.
MCEVERS: You talk about how this technique started, you know, with the military, and it's only now being piloted in police departments like the LAPD. Do you expect this method to become standard practice across the country?
KOLKER: That's a really tricky question. There are people who've been doing their way of interrogations for 10, 20, 30 years, and they don't necessarily want to be told that what they've been doing is wrong.
MCEVERS: Right.
KOLKER: However, one thing that the police departments have been lacking is any sort of academic research that can actually back up the call for a reform in the police interrogations. And now there is that. And so there are police departments out there - Dallas is one, Philadelphia and certainly LA - who are ready to start trying to infuse this new method into their training.
MCEVERS: That investigative journalist Bob Kolker. His piece in Wired magazine is titled "Nothing But The Truth." It was published in collaboration with The Marshall Project. Thanks so much.
KOLKER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.