Of all the miserable things that can happen on the way home from a long day of work, one of the worst surely is to become a cautionary tale in the psychology of police interrogation techniques.
So it was that Michael Dixon, 45, came to be in a Hamilton, Ont., police station at three o’clock in the morning — later to be charged with burglary, a crime he did not commit — and subjected to the blunt, accusatory tactics of the Reid Technique, an interrogation strategy in wide use by police across Canada that has come under fire recently for the risk of false confessions and Charter violations. As Mr. Dixon discovered before being tossed in the cells over a weekend, it is a strategy in which innocence is not an option.
Even Canada’s top interrogator, Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, who was praised for the weapons-grade guile by which he convinced sex killer Russell Williams to confess, saw a murder confession he obtained overturned in court last month, when a judge ruled he had badgered a vulnerable man into a false choice: confess or be damned. As a judge put it, the young man’s will was overcome, and he said what he thought the police wanted to hear, that he had shaken his girlfriend’s baby to death.
That confession, from a 26-year-old Ontario man whom the judge described as having “extremely low” intellectual functioning, was the intended outcome of a classic application of the Reid Technique, in which an initial fact-finding interview is followed by confrontation, with police claiming to know the suspect is guilty. Deceitful evidence can be described, such as non-existent surveillance video, and real evidence exaggerated. Other people might be condemned for their roles in the crime in order to lessen the responsibility of the interviewee, and his redeeming qualities might be highlighted, such as honesty or compassion, to encourage a confession with an explanation.
![OPP]( "Det. Sgt. Jim Smyth from the Ontario Provincial Police interviews murder suspect Col Russell Williams.")
OPPDet. Sgt. Jim Smyth from the Ontario Provincial Police interviews murder suspect Col Russell Williams.
The officer will display understanding and sympathy to minimize blame. Then, moving aggressively into their physical space — often the interviewer will have a wheeled chair, and the subject a fixed one — the officer will suggest alternate scenarios of the crime, each worse than the next, to encourage the subject to confess to the lesser of the two.
Most controversially, when the subject protests his innocence and tells a story that conflicts with the police theory of guilt, the Reid strategy is not for the officer to listen patiently and take notes to compare with other evidence, but rather to talk over him, delivering monologues about how the crime is already solved, and the only question remaining is how harsh the punishment will be.
Unfortunately, as Mr. Dixon discovered, in a Reid interrogation, innocence is not part of the plan. As a judge put it earlier this year, in awarding Mr. Dixon nearly $50,000 for false imprisonment, false arrest and negligent investigation, the police interrogator, Detective Jason Leek, “was convinced of Mr. Dixon’s guilt before he commenced the interview. He seemed to adopt the same approach as the other two officers, that Mr. Dixon was guilty until proven innocent.”
Aug. 14, 2003, was a long day for Mr. Dixon, who lived in Hamilton but worked in Toronto setting up exhibits at trade shows, and he arrived at the Hamilton bus station just after 1 a.m. Likewise, the police officers who arrested him for burglary had been on shift for 12 hours during a province-wide power-outage.
A call came in to 911 saying that a white man with a buzz cut and white shoes was breaking into a jewellery store near the bus station. Officers who responded lost sight of the man during a chase in a parking lot, then arrested Mr. Dixon, a black man with a shaved head wearing black boots, who happened to be walking home past the same parking lot. He said he had just got off a bus, an alibi that would have been easily confirmed with the driver, so easy that the bus drove by during the arrest, and Mr. Dixon pleaded, “There goes the bus!” But the police had their man, and the focus shifted to getting a confession.
“Your innocence and guilt in this is, quite frankly, isn’t an issue,” Det. Leek told him when the interview began two hours later. “The evidence I have is frankly conclusive and overwhelming. OK. So I’m not even going to ask you if you did it. What I have to ascertain here is what kind of guy you are, whether this is, you’re like a serial burglar, and this is what you’re doing all the time, or whether this is a one-off thing because of the power [outage], and everything that’s going on tonight. That’s all we’re here for.”
“It was surreal,” Mr. Dixon said in an interview Friday. “I still had a sense of humour about it. I thought, this is frustrating, this is stupid, wait until I tell the guys at work tomorrow. My feeling was it was going to be resolved then and there, it’s a big inconvenience, but not the end of the world.”
He said he felt impatient and insulted. He felt he saw through the strategy, but was still eager to give as much information as he could. For the first 13 minutes, however, the officer did not ask a single substantive question, instead lying about non-existent video of the crime, to which Mr. Dixon exclaimed, “Perfect!”
When Det. Leek did finally ask Mr. Dixon about his activities that night, the mood shifted dramatically, and Mr. Dixon jumped up to draw a diagram. At one point, Mr. Dixon took a man-to-man approach, asking whether the video evidence is a bluff.
“It’s not a game of poker,” Det. Leek said. “I’ve got nothing to gain from it either way, which is why I’m not asking you ‘Did you do it?’. I’ve got nothing to gain from that.”
“It just stings being doubted until proven innocent,” Mr. Dixon told him. “That’s the premise here, right?”
Police in Canada do not speak on behalf of the courts, and are forbidden from making explicit threats or promises about how a suspect will be treated. But interviews done by the Reid Technique often involve implicit threats and promises, according to Brent Snook, a psychologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland who advocates an alternative strategy that is starting to catch on among police forces.
They also promote police tunnel vision, and risk tainting memories. Police interviewers “get the first crack at memory,” Prof. Snook said, and “memory should be treated like a fresh crime scene.”
But by telling a suspect their guilt is already proven, police risk having their bluff called, and hitting an investigative dead-end, unable to nail the guilty or clear the innocent. Likewise, the “minimizing/maximizing” strategy of saying the only question is whether the suspect is a nice guy acting out of character, and thus deserving of leniency, or a cold-blooded criminal deserving of severe punishment, begs the question of whether he actually did it, and comes dangerously close to improper threats and promises.
“It’s quite scary. Now you have an over-confident individual going into an interrogation with a closed mind,” Prof Snook said.
The alternative, known as PEACE, which stands for preparation and planning, engage and explain, account, closure, evaluation, is closer to the scientific method, in which police interviewers focus on falsifying hypotheses rather than proving hunches. Its methods have been worked into training by forces in Ontario and B.C., and also at the national Canadian Police College in Ottawa, where it is gaining support.
“I’ve never met an officer who doesn’t want to do a good job,” Prof. Snook said. “The crux of the PEACE model is that every interview ought to be treated with an open mind.”
Or, as he puts it, if the Reid Technique is Starsky and Hutch, in which two hot heads beat up suspects to make them confess, then PEACE is Columbo, in which the rumpled hero congenially asks questions and studies answers until he checkmates the bad guy with “Just one more thing…” (Similarly, the judge who tossed the tainted confession obtained by Det-Sgt. Smyth compared him to “The Borg” in Star Trek, which colonizes other planets with the announcement that “Resistance is futile.”)
![.]( "In Columbo, the rumpled hero congenially asks questions and studies answers until he checkmates the bad guy with “Just one more thing...”")
.In Columbo, the rumpled hero congenially asks questions and studies answers until he checkmates the bad guy with “Just one more thing...”
The problem, according to the Chicago-based company that publishes textbooks on the Reid Technique, is that PEACE may also be somewhat toothless, a bit too Murder, She Wrote for the average hard-nosed cop.
When Prof. Snook and others published an article last year criticizing the Reid Technique, Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates in Chicago, responded in a letter to police that PEACE is essentially the first step in Reid, “a non-accusatory, fact-finding interview.”
“The difference thereafter, is that in the PEACE model they are not allowed to engage in the interrogation process in which the investigator attempts to persuade the suspect to tell the truth about what they did,” he wrote. “As a result the PEACE model severely limits the investigator’s ability to solve cases.”
The basic tactics of the Reid Technique, including lying about evidence, have been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Oickle, a 2000 case about an arsonist whose confession was rejected by a lower court. Since then, judges have frequently heard arguments about Reid, and gone both ways in their analysis of its specific uses, tossing out some accusatory interrogations while accepting others.
One officer in Alberta testified the Reid Technique is a “very a successful method of obtaining confessions.”
The problem, according to Constable Mike Stinson of the Sudbury Police Service, an advocate of PEACE, is that the goal of interviews should not be to obtain confessions, but rather to learn the truth.
He is unequivocal that he would never allow his children to be interviewed alone by police, knowing what they are trained to do in the interview room.
“It wouldn’t even need to be a serious crime,” he said. “From what I know of this, and how I’ve seen officers apply it, I would never let my kids be interviewed by the police without me being there. If they were a suspect, they wouldn’t be interviewed.”
Const. Stinson said there is a cultural belief among police, alluring but false, that they can tell when they are being lied to, that hard experience and gut instinct combine to make a human lie detector.
“That culture is not justified by the empirical research,” Prof. Snook said, and yet it is epitomized in the unyielding stance of the Reid-style interrogator.
Const. Stinson said he still feels the sting of a failed interview early in his career, when he was investigating a young man for stealing a motorcycle, and fell back on Reid strategies.
“So I throw the bluff at him. I got witnesses. Fine, he says. Prove it. He just called my bluff and now I got nothing,” he said. “I got owned… That still burns me today. I didn’t know what I was doing in there.”
National Post
jbrean@nationalpost.com
