Questioning Techniques

OK, great job!  You've planned, prepared, and built a genuine rapport.  Time to start collecting information from your victim / witness / suspect / informant / whatever.

Let's dive into some approaches to questioning and techniques that will facilitate collection.

30 minutes to be a better interviewer!  

This stuff works, give it a try!  And follow That LEO Guy!

I make a rhyme every time!

-LEO

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:04

Good morning. Let's go ahead and deliver some more free training. And this time on questioning techniques. At this point, we've planned, we've prepared, we've developed rapport. We're ready to start asking questions.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

So, how do we do that? And what's the goal?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

The goal is simple it's achieve cooperation, it's gain trust so that they give honest, thorough information, be them a suspect, victim, or witness. That's what we want. And we've talked about how to put the horse before the cart. And now we're to the cart. We're ready to collect information. This person in this hypothetical is ready to talk to us. How do we get it? Unfortunately, we're not diving right into it because the approaches are part of it. And that's you're ready to start asking questions. But one technique for questioning is direct questioning. That's the rarest for me with a suspect interview. Direct questioning is something like, did you kill John? That would be a very direct question. Did you steal the shirts? Generally, people say no. A cop is asking them a hard question. So they did something bad that they can get in trouble for. They can go to jail. And we want them to talk about that. So there's all these intangibles in the interview room. There's who is controlling the room. There's rapport coming and going. Rapport is not yes or no. It's in and out. There's questioning. There's you assessing where am I? Who has control? Who needs control in this room? And then there's approaches, which we're about to go into, which can be revisited. How do I approach this person to get them talking to me? That's not rapport development. That's getting them to start talking. Lots of different theories on approaches and techniques. There's motivational interview techniques, incentive approaches, which you have to be very careful with because I've seen a lot of investigators start making promises in the room and promises of benefit. You need to go to a class. If you're promising benefit for cooperation against themselves, you're going to get yourself into hot water. You're going to get your confession suppressed. Things like the truth will set you free. I'm not going to charge you if you tell me this. Stuff like that is going to get you in hot water. Emotional approaches. This is what I love. A lot of the violent criminals I've dealt with are emotional people. That's why they do violent crime. They lose control of their emotions and they pull the trigger. And these seem to be great approaches when you can get someone in an emotional state. Strategic use of evidence, when to introduce evidence, another technique, and then cognitive interviewing. There's a million more. You go to a class tomorrow, you'll hear something different. But these are the ones that I'm going to be talking about. Incentive approaches. You need to go to classes. I am not here to give legal advice. You need to talk to your prosecutor and you need to go to a full-blown class to really understand this or do your research. Or if you can't get to a class, take the time to go talk to a prosecutor and say, what can I say and what can I not say as far as what we're about to talk about? Can you say, I'll talk to the prosecutor? You know, if you, if they say, what's in it for me if I do this? Well, I'll talk to the prosecutor. I'll tell you what I'll say. I'll say, I'll talk to the prosecutor and I'll let them know that you cooperated with me on this. And I appreciate your cooperation. All that is true. I didn't say, I'll talk to the prosecutor and you'll get less time. You'll get a reward for it. I just said, I promise you I will let the prosecutor know that you cooperated with me and that I needed this cooperation in this investigation. I'm not promising them any benefit. But you do need to be careful on that line because if you don't really understand it and you cross it for one second and you make them a promise of a like tangible reward, like less time or immunity from prosecution, stuff that you really can't promise. It's not in your wheelhouse, and you do that, your confession is going to get suppressed. Minimization, that's another incentive, but it's not offering something. It's more like taking away a negative stimulus. So minimizing their role. A lot of murders will stay with shootings. A lot of shootings, there's multiple people involved. So minimizing their role. Hey, you were you got in the car. Did you even know where you were going? Give them an out to where they'll start putting themselves on the scene, start putting a gun in their own hand. A lot of these shooters, they were raised with uh not shooters. I'm talking about that as an example. Shoplifters, thieves, robbers. They were raised with a lack of accountability. They had either one of two things, no one holding them accountable, or somebody coming in telling them that they did no wrong. You know, if they get a call, the kind of parent or grandparent that if they get a call from the school, they're gonna mess around and yell at the teacher. Because my baby could do no wrong. And then you end up with an adult that doesn't take accountability. So they love when they do something shitty, like hurt somebody, and you put it on somebody else and you go, was it even your idea to do this? Like you went along, but how long has Johnny been pushing you into stuff you didn't want to do? That's removing a negative. Giving them a break. If they're looking super nervous, it's okay to go, hey, do you smoke? You want to go have a cigarette? You look stressed, bro, and go out and have one with them. If you don't smoke, just stand with them and talk for a minute and take your time. Give them 15 minutes to smoke. Let them smoke two if they need to. Get them off the ledge. It's fine. If there's somebody they don't like, an interviewer they don't like, make that person leave. That's a reward. Like, hey, do you mind stepping out? Tell your partner. Do you mind stepping out? If you got a good backup interviewer, a good secondary, they should listen to you. Do you mind stepping out for a second so I can talk to him? And they should go, yeah, that's fine. And they step out, and then they can probably see in the room, they can probably watch, and they'll see you go, hey, I feel a bad vibe. Like, do you not like him? And they might go, Yeah, that guy's an asshole. All right, do you want to just talk to me? Or I have to have two people. Do you want me to just get somebody else? Like, I feel bad vibes. People will respect that because you're showing them respect. That's an approach. Let's get into the emotional approaches. This is this is what I like. There's the we know all approach. That's when you you generally have some information, but you're gonna pretend that you have a lot more. You have to be cautious with this because if you start speculating, you're pretending you have a lot more. But as soon as you lie and get caught in a lie, and it could be as simple as, I know you fired, and they didn't fire. They might have pointed a gun at the guy and put him on the ground and then their friend shot. Are they damn near just as culpable for that? Yeah. They were right there along for the murder. They all they did was put them on the ground. But when you start saying, I know for a fact you fired, it's on video that you fired. I can see your face, and they're not on video firing because they didn't fire. You got a situation. So we know all. You don't have to tell them everything. And you can tell them that when they start pressing, I'm not, I'm not turning over my whole file, but I have done my research. There's a reason I'm here talking to you today. It's because we've been talking to people. We've been doing our homework. We've been doing all the electronic stuff that goes on behind the scenes. We've already done all that. This is the last stage. And so I'm here to talk to you. That's they're starting to think, what does this guy know? You don't have to hem and haw about what you know. It's none of their business. They're gonna find out. They don't have to be rude about it. Futility is another approach, getting them to think that they're already busted. They're already caught. Let's go into the next four. I these are my go-to's. Uh, one is called pride and ego up or pride and ego down. It's bringing them up or putting them down. Example of pride and ego up would be you've been in this gang for how long? Oh, 12 years. All right. Have you ever turned on somebody else?

SPEAKER_00 9:50

No, we got a rule against snitching. All right, so you don't tell on people. No. Okay. So you've done what you're supposed to the whole time, and they left you out to dry.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Because do you think I'm here talking to you because nobody talked to me? You're gonna be the last soldier standing. They're not following the rules. You see how that went? I blew their ego up a little bit. You're a good little gang member. You did the right thing. They suck. Another option, pride and ego down, would look something like this, staying with some kind of gang violence. All right, so how long have you been in the gang? Oh, 12 years. How long has that gang, how long have the Vice Lords had this level of police attention? This is new. Yeah, this is new. And do you do you care about that organization? Is that your family? Yeah, that's family. They're my brothers. Okay, cool. So do you realize you're bringing heat to that organization? The bodies brought the heat. The drug dealing didn't bring me down, didn't bring me on you. You, y'all pimping girls that didn't put me on you. Y'all stealing and robbing. I know about some of those robberies you did. I know about that dude y'all robbed and killed two years ago. But the only reason I know is because you're dropping bodies.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

You're dropping other bodies at random, because you're a hothead, bro.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

See what I did there? I made him the bad guy. I just isolated him from the gang. How would your group feel if they knew that they're all getting indicted because of you? Because of your actions, because you're operating outside the laws. You're not supposed to just be shooting random people. You brought the heat.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

You brought the police on the group.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

So we can either make this about you or about Johnny, Janie, Frankie, Molly, Polly, all these other people. Those are not common gang names, but that's what we're going with today. Molly and Polly are hella dangerous. But you're putting them down. You're making them feel bad. It's going to depend a lot on how rapport building went and what you know about this person. Some people you can't make feel bad. They're cocky. Bring them up. Or you might have to bring them down a little bit because they're too cocky and get them to realize that they're effing over their loved ones. Let's go into fear up and down. This is the next one. Making them scared, making them more scared of what's going on. Hey, I just want to, if they're kind of a stat-driven person, they're kind of a thinker, I just want to take you through. Uh, you haven't really done any time in your life, have you? No. Or they've done a lot of time. You did a lot of time. You don't really want to go back. No, hell no, I don't want to go back. I got six 15-year-olds now that I'm raising. All right, cool. That's cool.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

You had six kids at the same time. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

So you don't want to go back. Let's just go through some of the stuff that we have. This is kind of a combination of like we know all and fear up.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

I think we got you dead to rights on a couple shootings.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

And you know, the sentencing guidelines, it's like 25 to life with your history, like 25 to life per shooting. So if you don't want to deal with that, let's have a conversation. Just again, be very careful of promises of benefit, but make them fear something. Not you. You shouldn't be in their face yelling, screaming, all this crap. But you can make them fear prison. You can make, I wouldn't threaten them with gang retaliation, but if it's realistic that their actions are going to get them hurt by their own gang or another gang, where they're going into a prison that's full of bloods and they're a crip, you can bring that up. That's not a threat. That's a fact. Hey, you know, you're about to go to parchment.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

It's all blood in there. You know that, right? It's all blood. And they probably already know. Yeah. You want to go to parchment? Yes is grass.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

I'm just being realistic. I'm not threatening you. I'm just telling you how parchment is. Crips don't do well. I don't know anything about parchment, but it's just an example. And then there's also fear down. Some people are terrified. Kids, people that haven't done a lot of time, or people that have had bad sentences, you know, bad, bad prison terms. They're terrified in there. Or terrified of going in there. And so you may need to bring their fear down a little bit. Hey, I'm not here to get you. I don't want to see you do a bunch of time. That's why I'm having this conversation with you the way I am. You don't hear me trying to hem you up. I'm trying to get info on who else was involved. Let's say your suspect you're interviewing is named Johnny. I'll tell him just like this: this ain't about Johnny. This is bigger than Johnny. You can make it about Johnny if you want. We can make it all about you.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Because right now, that's what I have. But I don't want it to be like that. I'm looking at the Grape Street Crips in Lakeview Gardens.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

So if you want to talk to me about that, this doesn't need to be about Johnny. Their fear's gonna go down a little bit. Oh, this isn't about me. I'm not even really the target. No, you are the target of this interview and this investigation.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

But I'm taking your fear down. Then there's love and hate.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Some people have a lot of love for their organization or their family. Love of family is fine. Let's get off gangs for a minute. Love of the gang is easy to do. Let's do love of family. You catch a normal guy shoplifting.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

You're a patrol officer. You catch him shoplifting. You're starting the interview. All right. I see you stole a bunch of four T shirts. Is your kid four or is he a big two-year-old?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

I just opened the door to Love of Family right there. I just asked if they stole the shirts and why they stole the shirts all in one question. Does that make sense? I've already mirandized at this point because I'm I'm asking them about it. But the difference in did you steal the shirts? You got 50 shirts in your car. You stole 50 shirts. And looking at the label, hey, you stole a bunch of, you got a bunch of, not even you stole, that's a hard word.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

You got a bunch of 4T. Who's four? Can I see a picture?

SPEAKER_01 16:36

If they pull out a picture of a four-year-old and say, my baby doesn't have school clothes and they just stole $5,000 worth of shirts, they pretty much just confessed without it getting abrasive. Write that down. And then there's hate. Let's go back to gangs because I like gangs. I think gang work is very useful because they victimize people. Get them to hate the gang a little bit. Make the gang the bad guy. Villainize their own gang. Okay. What do you have to do to be a Great Street Crip in the Lakeview Gardens neighborhood? What do you have to do? What'd you have to do to be in there? Oh, all right. So you were 14 and they had you shooting up vacant houses to prove you were a member. You didn't know they were vacant, but they, you know, three adults would drive you around and watch you shoot up houses and they were just testing you?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Does that make sense now that you're 20?

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Were those dudes looking out for you get develop their hatred for the other people involved? There's a ton more.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Those are the ones that I like the most. Pride and ego, up and down, hate and love. It gets them emotional. And when people are in the interview room, if they stay on the logical side of their brain, right or left or whatever, the logical side says, don't talk to the police. That's logic. Don't talk to police. How many times have lawyers been like, why the hell did you talk to the police? I mean, there's an interview episode of The Wire where I forget the kid's name. He's like Avon Barksdale's nephew or something. And he like writes an apology note to a security guard that he killed his family. And the lawyer comes in and it's like the short chubby white dude. I forget his name, but he I never even knew his name. But he comes in and he's like, I'm his lawyer. He's not answering any more questions. And he's like actively writing an apology note. And the lawyer like slaps him in front of the cops and everybody. He like slaps them in the face. He's like, get your ass out of here. Why are we writing apology notes? That's what we want. We want the lawyer pissed. I mean, we don't want the guy getting slapped by the lawyer, but you know what I'm saying. So let's get into strategic use of evidence. The planning and prep phase, huge for this. You need to have your evidence with you. Not necessarily not necessarily physically, but photos, printouts, recordings, whatever you have, have it ready to use. And then you strategically implement that when you're ready. You don't have to immediately counter their lie. That's why it's strategic. It's not just use of evidence. You don't just come and lay it on the table. You talk to them first. And then when you're ready, when they say, Oh no, I've never even been in Cash America Pond before. And when you get to the end, you might go, All right, so you've never been to Cash America Pond on Park F. Nah, never been in that store. All right. And then you pull up the video of them in the store.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

You go, what about what about here? That's Cash America Pond on Park.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

That's strategic use of evidence, DNA, fingerprints, video, recordings of interviews, man, phone dumps or social media dumps where you've put a certain conversation into its own PDF file and printed it out, and you're ready to present that. And they're like, say they shot Johnny, and they're like, oh, I haven't talked to Johnny in years. Yeah, I knew him way back, but I haven't now I haven't seen him in forever. And you have a conversation between him and Johnny the night of the murder, and you slide it over and go, this was this was on August 18. He was killed at 1 a.m. on August 19. This is y'all talking. What do you mean? Let's let's go back a little bit. Let's rewind and forget that you told me you haven't talked to Johnny in years. Can we just wipe that out of this conversation and start being honest now? That's a strategic use of evidence. I'm not being a dick about it. I'm just guiding him towards the truth. But it is, it's strategic. It's not just slapping it out at random. I've seen that quite a bit, just kind of like showing them everything, basically giving them discovery, and then they don't talk, and you just furnished information to them. So let them tell their story first, open-ended questions so that they can talk and implore them to keep talking, whatever avenues they go within reason, within the scope. You know, if they start talking about something totally different, get them back on track. But should be a dialogue, not yes and no questions. If you get into yes and no questions, you need to go back to rapport phase. Rapport is gone once it's. Do you know Johnny? Yes. If they're giving you one word answers, you don't have rapport. Think about when you talk to your actual friends, do they give you one-word answers? No, your middle schooler gives it to you when you say, How is school? You don't have rapport with that kid. If you're saying how is school and they say good and go to their room, you don't have rapport. If you say, What'd you learn today? and they say nothing, you don't have rapport with that kid. You got to develop it, probably. Let's get into the funnel method. I love this. What this comes down to is they shouldn't know if you're using this method what you're really questioning them about. Picture like an hourglass with sand in it. Excuse me, it's big at the top, it comes down like a skinny little waist, and then it gets wide again, and there's sand coming through it. The information you want is at that skinny little waist. You only hit it briefly. You're going to talk about a lot of stuff first. Let's say they got caught with a gun and they're a felon. You pulled them over on a traffic stop. He had a gun in his pants, and he's a convicted felon. So, what information do you need? He's a five-time felon. He's getting armed career criminal. If it goes to federal court, he's looking at 25 to life. So you want this to stick. You want a confession. You don't want him to say it was somebody else's pants that the gun was in, and some juror believe it. So we're going to funnel it. What do we need? We need the law. We need to know the law, which means we need to prove that he's a convicted felon. He knows he can't have a gun. And he possess he actually possessed the gun. Does that mean we just say, you the right or maybe silent, and he's you had Ken and Will? Is that your gun? It's probably not going to work. How about we talk about other things? All right, who are these guys that were in the car with you? How do you know Johnny? Boom, we're way out. Then we're going to narrow it in, narrow it in. All right. Might be as simple as how how long have you had that? Or why'd you get that? But we're going to touch on the gun briefly, and it's going to be after a while. And then after we're done with that, we're going to, we're going to funnel back out. We're going to let them think that we weren't even really that concerned about. We can go back to it if we need to, but we don't want that to be the focal point, like a magnifying glass when you hold it in the sun and burn a leaf. You know, that little focal point that it turns into. We don't want them feeling that the thing that they're concerned about is the focus of the conversation, even though it is. We don't want them looking at it that way. So when you're funneling it, you ask them to tell you something, then you add, then you flesh it out. You ask them to explain it, describe it further. Then you're eventually going to go to a specific question. But you kind of let them run the conversation for as long as you can. Some other techniques, good cop, bad cop. We've all heard this. You know, the TV does it in a very extreme way, where like one guy's screaming and has to get dragged out and all this shit. Usually I'm the good cop. I don't play a bad cop, but I'm, I usually try to be understanding of people. And a lot of investigators are not. And so we naturally do this. And it's okay for me to like, if if the other investigator steps out, be like, You all right? Like, you all right with him? Like, I'll let him be the bad cop a little bit if it gets a confession for his case or her case. Change of scenery is a good one. Just moving the interview. If it's not going well, doing it somewhere else, and just planning where you're going to do the interview. If it's somebody that you think is going to shut down on the police station, don't do it there. Do it in the car. The silent approach. It's a great technique. Just silence. If they give you an answer that's bogus and you're ready to confront that lie, don't be a robot who confronts a lie with, you're lying. Most people don't respond well to that. They shut down. So cool, you proved your point. You were big and bad while they're in handcuffs, and now they're not going to prison because they didn't confess. So just sit there silently. When they lie, they get so uncomfortable. Do it to a kid. Test this on your kid. When they lie to you, don't let them just leave the room after their lie.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

But if if they I don't know, broke a broke a window. And you say, hey, what happened to the window? And they go, I don't know. And they're squirming out of their skin, just sit there. And they're gonna be like, what? Why are you sitting there? Just wait. I'm just I'm waiting for you to tell me what happened. Eventually you can say that.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

I'm just waiting for you to tell me what happened. It doesn't have to be mean and abrasive and like calling him a liar. Just your character's better than this. I'm just waiting for you to be you again. Great technique is a timeline. I mean, we could go way down the rabbit hole. We could do three episodes on this, but a lot of crimes, there's a chronology to it, a case chronology. And developing that timeline, there's lots of different stuff you can do with this. You can go backwards. You know, if they provide an alibi and they say, Oh, I was at such and such bar, I couldn't have been at that shooting. I was at the bar. Okay. Where were you before the bar? Oh, I was at my cousin's house. All right, how'd you get from your cousins to the bar? Oh, oh, we drove. My cousin drove me there. Oh, all right. How long's that drive? That's like 10 minutes. All right, where does your cousin live? Just so I can corroborate this. Oh, he lives on the east side. Okay. So your cousin drove. What is what kind of car does he drive? So now you're just going into all these details backwards. It's really hard to lie backwards. And so that's one. And there's just general timeline establishment. You don't have to say we're establishing a timeline, but you just walk them through it. And when you're lying, it's really hard to keep your timeline straight. It just, as humans, it just tends to come apart. So definitely if they're, if it's an event with a chronology, I mean, if it's a one-time shoplifting, there's no chronology. There's just they stole some shirts. But if it's this, if it's a shooting, a stabbing, something where thing other things were happening that was not just the crime, you need to really explore those things. And it's hard to lie on a timeline and yeah. And then you can just find all these holes in it. So I hope this helps you with some questioning techniques, lots of other options, but that's kind of a down and dirty on once you get to the questioning phase. And please remember that you can always go back to rapport.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Always.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

When rapport fails, the interview generally fails. And I've talked about suspect, victim, witness. All this is important for confidential informants too. Rapport is huge. If you don't have rapport, expect that they'll they'll play you, they'll try to work you like Whitey Bulger. We don't want that. And you just want to get the most info you can. So you can use questioning techniques on informants. If you have a gang member informant, do you have to tell them exactly what you're looking for? Can you tell them that you're just buying a gun from the one from a guy in his gang? I mean, all groups, we you, you're a cop listener. You got cops you don't like, but this gang member has another gang member he doesn't like. He might be willing to buy a gun from a convicted felon fellow gang member. It happens. Or buy drugs from them.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

A lot of you guys are probably drug unit guys. Well, what they don't realize is you're going after the whole group.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

And they're getting you in so that you can set up a wiretap. Your informant doesn't need to know, hey, I want a wiretap. All they need to know is I'm working on this one guy. So all this stuff that that's kind of like the funneling technique. Like we're gonna talk about all this other stuff. We're not talking about the gang leader that you don't even know that I know about. We're talking about Johnny. But when I go up on Johnny's phone, I know he talks to the gang leader. Johnny serves a kilo a week, and the leader distributes 50 kilos a week. So I want to go, I want to go up on a wire and then spin up to the to Rail in charge or whatever. So use this for whatever. It just comes down to human intelligence collection, and that's what this is. Good luck. Have a great September.