Page 366 - NIXBOOK

When played correctly and when the conditions are right, it can work beautifully and I managed to get confessions using that
technique quite a few times. My success rate was far from perfect, but it did work more often than not. Interesting to note that
it doesn’t matter if the suspect fesses up to a suggested motive that is not the actual reason. For example, a lot of times the real
reason for the crime may actually be the worst case scenario, like the suspect truly is being selfish and stole the car just to be a
jerk. But if they want to confess to stealing the car so they could deliver food to the homeless shelter, that’s okay too because in
the end it is still a confession. Maybe later in court when the sentence is handed down, the motive will be considered, but for
the most part, for most petty misdemeanor crimes, the defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t have the time or mental
energy to care what exactly each criminal was thinking when it happened; the penalties imposed usually just boils down to
“What kind of prior convictions are on this persons’ record?”

Even the worst crimes can be minimized and a softer option can be offered to elicit a confession. If a guy is caught with child
porn and is reluctant to admit he intentionally downloaded it all, the tactic could be like “Listen Joe, it’s not that big of a deal.
You’re just looking at pictures. You didn’t even take any of them. It’s not like you had the kids there in person, it’s just pictures!
You were curious, huh? It’s okay to be curious. Or Joe – and I hate to think this – maybe you’re more than curious and actually
all these pictures were taken in your house?” Again, the goal would be to get Joe to say something like “I never touched any little
kids, I just looked at pictures!” and BAM! there’s the confession. Of course though you have to make sure the bad guy really isn’t
doing the worse thing, because if he is then you get a confession for that. “Hey Joe it’s not like you were killing little kids in a
dungeon, you were just taking pictures of them right? Not to hurt them right? Just taking pictures? Or did you want to hurt
them? You didn’t want to hurt little kids did you? No, you were just taking pictures, right?” If necessary, this monologue could
be repeated using different words as long as necessary. Even if the suspect is quiet, at some point they may break down and
mentally decide to accept the better alternative. The FBI agents told us sometimes in really big cases they’d spent 5 to 7 hours
or more in one sided non-stop conversations before the bad guy would finally confess; they’d throw out all kinds of different
excuses and motives and eventually, if the guy didn’t invoke his right to an attorney and wanted to actually put up the
interrogation, he’d accept one of the excuses offered to him. They also said they’d interview child molesters and minimize it to
the suspects by saying “Well at least you’re not a terrorist!” and then when they’d interview actual terrorists they say “Hey at
least you’re not a child molester!”
There was merit in the philosophy of not giving a suspect an opportunity to deny outright participation in a crime. A lot of
interrogators would never ask any form of “Did you do it?” because it is generally a suspect’s first inclination to blurt out a “NO!”
and once somebody starts denying something, getting them to reverse their statement can be pretty hard. So I never asked
simple yes or no questions. I would always ask things like “Hey I’ll bet that was pretty scary when the cops started chasing you,
huh? I’m sure meeting the cops was the last thing you wanted right then. Listen, I just have a question – did you plan that whole
thing out in advance or was it more like a spur of the moment opportunity that you just impulsively acted on? I’m guessing you
didn’t think about it beforehand. Like it just happened even before you knew what you were doing, huh? Or did you mean to
do that? No, you didn’t plan any of that ahead; you’re not like a career criminal bad guy, are you?. Boy I’ll bet some part of you
must have regretted doing that, huh?” And as soon as the bad guy nods his head in agreement at some point, then the confession
is well underway.

I adopted this to all kinds of questioning, like at traffic accidents when interviewing the person who had clearly caused the crash.
Instead of asking “Were you driving distracted?” and given them an easy opportunity to say “No,” I’d instead say “So…were you
distracted by something inside your car, or outside your car?”

Other random things I remember from police trainings:
Another time we had an active shooter response team training at an empty high school, during summer break. Several different
departments sent all their officers and deputies to that one. Traditionally, it had been standard operating procedure for patrol
officers to set up containment and wait for a SWAT team to go in and confront a loose gunman in a school shooting event, but
as the years went by and there were more school shootings, on a national level everybody everywhere began to realize that
waiting any length of time for a SWAT team to show up and deploy was ridiculous. So then patrol officers were taught to wait
just long enough to get a small team formed, and then they’d quickly go into the school and end the active shooter situation.
The method we were taught then was to team up with the first 3 other officers that arrived – from any jurisdiction – and we’d
group up very close together into a tactical diamond formation; one officer points a gun straight ahead, two guys behind him
and to the sides cover the right and left, and one guy in back faces backward, and then the group goes into the school and hunts
down the gunman and clears the school hallways and classrooms. I was able to master the technique enough though to figure
out where to start out during the practice runs; after the first couple run throughs I saw which guy wound up in front at the last
corner when the actor playing a gunman would be confronted, so after that I always started out in the lead, so by the time we
got to the final scene I’d have already rotated myself to the covering the rear. Not because I was a coward, but because there was
just a lot of pressure on the front shooter at that final moment, since all the instructors were watching nearby at then. This