All rules are subordinate to the golden rule: make an honest human connection.
Back in the room, and it’s time for round two. Same case, same suspect. Only this time, Frank Barnet would be a different kind of character. I’d asked Laurence and Lloyd to give me a taste of the range of challenges a police interviewer can face.
When Barnet sat down opposite me this time, he didn’t stare suspiciously, and he didn’t put his feet on the table. He looked at the floor, as if he didn’t want to make eye contact. When he spoke, it was in a soft, hesitant voice. I asked him what he had been doing on the day in question. He started to answer before tailing off. He asked, ‘Is the girl all right?’
I gave a cursory answer before returning to my questions on the events of his day. After a long pause, he said, in a small voice, ‘I want to help, but I’m just confused. I wouldn’t do something like this. They arrested me in front of the school, when I was with my kids.’ I said that must have difficult for him, then continued my enquiry.
Laurence paused the interview and asked me how it was going. I said I felt more confident this time, more in control. Laurence frowned. ‘I thought you were strangely un-empathetic. Your tone was almost exactly the same as the first interview, albeit a bit less nervous. There was no modulation.’
I realised he was right. I was so concerned with sounding like Detective Inspector Leslie – authoritative, in charge – that I had forgotten the need to adapt my tone to the person in front of me. Lloyd joined in. ‘If you’re going to say, “That must be very difficult for you,” and it hasn’t got the right emotion behind it, it’s not worth saying,’ he told me.
This was a crucial lesson: sympathy without feeling is worse than no sympathy at all. ‘Unless you sound like you actually care about what happened to me, I just feel like I’m part of a process, and you’re just moving me along.’
It was important, continued Lloyd, to appear persuadable. ‘If a police officer seems open-minded and non-judgemental there’s more chance I’m going to talk. Maybe it’s just because I think I can con you. Either way, if you give the impression you’ve already made up your mind, there’s no reason for me to talk.’
So the best interviewers have an ability to come across as if they have an open mind? ‘It’s not so much an ability,’ said Laurence, ‘as being genuinely interested in finding out the truth.’
* * *
British police officer Jake Rollnick (whose father Stephen was the co-founder of Motivational Interviewing whom we met earlier) told me about how he patiently builds rapport with people in crisis, before getting down to the action that needs taking – whether that’s an arrest or, just as often, getting them to a safe place. But as we wrapped up our conversation, Jake had one more point to make:
Rapport is important, but there are different ways to get there. My sergeant is a big bloke, rugby player, real Cardiff man. He always goes in confrontational, and it always works. I remember this suicidal lad who had slit his wrists and taken an overdose. I sat with him for ages, gently persuading him to let me take him to the hospital. Then Sarge walks in and starts shouting:
‘WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? DO YOU WANT ME TO TAKE YOU TO THE HOSPITAL OR WHAT? I CAN’T SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS FOR YOU. I’VE GOT WORK TO DO. IF YOU WANT TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL, I’LL TAKE YOU – OR YOU CAN SIT HERE AND DIE.’
‘It was all wrong,’ said Jake. ‘I sat there thinking to myself, he’s messed up all my good work. But the lad went with us to the hospital. And I’ve seen the sergeant do that again and again. Somehow he always ends up making a connection. There are no rules.’
It might seem odd, in a book of rules, to say this, but Jake is right: there are no hard and fast rules. Well, almost none. There is a golden thread running through all the conversations I had with people in the course of researching and writing this book, and it’s this: you can’t handle disagreement and conflict successfully if you don’t make a truthful human connection. If you have one, then all rules are moot. If you don’t have one, then the techniques and tactics you use are likely to do more harm than good.
* * *
During the stand-off with the Davidians, the FBI tried a series of persuasion tactics that were clumsy and counter-productive, as persuasion tactics tend to be when divorced from genuine empathy and curiosity. One of the techniques taught in negotiation textbooks is to identify common ground in order to develop rapport. It’s a fine principle – one that I have advanced here – but done clumsily it can sound insincere and cynical. For instance, one of the negotiators, proposing a plan to Koresh, told him that it had been sanctioned by his superior only after his boss, ‘a very devout Christian’ had prayed to God, ‘as we all do’. Koresh was unimpressed. Another of the FBI’s persuasion tactics was to send photos and videos of the released children, and messages written by the children, into the compound, so that the children’s parents would be motivated to come out and be reunited with them. Unsurprisingly, the Davidians were angered by this blatant attempt at manipulation.
Even the people you believe to be less intelligent than you (always a risky bet) may have a finely honed sense of the relationship signals you’re sending. Polis trainer Don Gulla emphasised that officers should never feign compassion and should always assume others are smart enough to see through any tricks, no matter who they are. ‘Mentally ill people are intelligent. They’re just ill. They know when you’re lying to them. Don’t try and be someone you’re not. Be real.’
One of Laurence Alison’s refrains is, ‘You’ve got to mean it.’ An interrogator’s curiosity should never be faked; it must be authentic. Laurence warned repeatedly against relying on ‘tricks’: techniques of manipulation that make the interrogator feel clever but are often seen through by interviewees. Tricks are attractive because they make us feel smart and in control, but they’re rarely as effective as promised, and can backfire. Niël Barnard, a former head of South African intelligence and one of the figures involved in brokering Mandela’s release from prison, had a rule of thumb for negotiation: ‘cleverness is stupidity’.
When Alfred Wilson decided to ask the truck driver about his life, he wasn’t deploying a trick; he really was interested. Charlan Nemeth found that the devil’s advocate game only works if the advocate really believes in her view. The hostage negotiators who spoke to Miriam Oostinga emphasised that an apology only works if it’s genuine. Viljoen knew that Mandela was for real when Mandela told him how much Afrikaners had hurt him.
* * *
Polis founder Jonathan Wender told me that when he was a cop, the thing he found hardest about the job was what he calls ‘the bureaucratic paradox’. It is only as a police officer, a wearer of the uniform, that he had licence to intrude upon people’s lives. But at the same time, it was only when he transcended his official role that he was able to influence them. ‘If my job as an officer is to build a sense of trust, I can’t do that by acting as a rigid bureaucrat. As long as I saw things through the technical lens of the law I could not influence people in a lasting way. I must be humanly authentic myself.’
Wender grew up in New Jersey, in a household full of books and ideas. ‘I was an intellectually inclined child.’ His parents owned an independent bookstore, his grandfather was a history professor. He studied philosophy and Middle Eastern languages at university, before joining a police department near Seattle. Six years into his police career, Wender began studying for a PhD that applied the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to law enforcement. His thesis later became a book, entitled Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life.
Talking to Wender is like listening to a continental philosopher who happens to know the most efficient way to execute an arm-lock. I asked him what it was about police work that he found so stimulating. ‘The world thinks about policing in terms of aggression, but for me, police work is intimate. You are interacting with people, over and again, at their moments of greatest vulnerability. You see people being born and you see them die. You talk to them about why their marriage is broken or why they tried to kill themselves. It is human nature in the raw.’
He returned, as he often does, to philosophy. ‘A human is not like a tree or a rock. We make meaning. A jet moving across a sky leaves a contrail of smoke, a boat moving through water leaves a wake; there’s no other way they can move. The same is true of a person moving through the world. When you walk into a room, you radiate meaning like a star gives off light.’ He paused. ‘So if that’s true, then good interaction with others means having a good purpose. Never objectify someone. Understand that they have a soul, and you have a soul.’