Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Professor Rey Bull, welcome to this podcast called “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” on Investigative Interviewing. 
Ray Bull: 
Thank you. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s an honor to have you on this podcast because I have to say, for me, Ivar Fahsing, as a young police officer and early academic, you were probably the most influential person in helping me and my good friend, Asbjørn Rachlev, in building a national police training program to Investigative Interviewing for Norwegian police around 25 years ago. Yes. So it’s a particular honor to have you here today. And also I have to behave because now I have to show you that I’m a good interviewer.  

Ray Bull: 

Of course, yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So this is the real test. Well, welcome Ray.  

Ray Bull: 

Thank you very much. 

Ivar Fahsing:  

Ray, since you have, you’re probably one of the few persons who have been seeing this development from it actually started. And it started in England and we could say that in the eighties. Yes. And could you please take us along to how did it actually start and why did it actually start?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, what happened was that in my country, in England, as in many countries around the world. Years ago, the people with the very difficult tasks of police interviewing people suspected of crime, many years ago now, they received no training, no help, no guidance from anybody. They just did their best. They did what common sense suggested to them. And in a small number of cases, their common sense, which of course is that a person who is guilty of a crime, the common sense view is that a guilty person would never of their own volition voluntarily tell the police. That’s the common sense view. We’ll come later to say that that is in fact a mistaken view and that’s a common sense view. And so of course, if you have no training in anything, you’re guided by common sense. 

So there were a small number of cases in my country before any interviewing was recorded where people who had been interviewed by the police, whether they were in prison saying they came out of prison or they were not imprisoned, they reported to their friends who reported to the media that in their opinion, they had been treated very harshly by police. In some cases they claimed that they’d been punched or hit. There was never any suggestion of terrible torture like with electricity and horrible stuff like that and other kinds of things. It was more the interviewer and getting frustrated and allegedly headbutting the suspect and things like that. And the chiefs police and the government took notice of that because when you’re lucky enough to live in a democracy such as Norway or England where one of the duties of the media is to report bad practice by any organisation and so the police were getting a bad name because the media were brave enough to report what allegedly happened in these small number of cases and that led the government to make a very groundbreaking decision at the time so we had legislation dated the year 1984, 1984, the interviewing by the police of suspects by law had to be audio tape-recorded. But the police were given two years to purchase the necessary expensive equipment and have proper rooms that were enabled good recording to occur. 

And initially, the police quite rightly were against this because they said to the government, are we the only profession that are legislating that has to tape record what they do? You don’t do this for medical doctors, you don’t do it for lawyers, you don’t do it for… why are we first chosen? But because of the bad publicity that had preceded, the government insisted and to the credit of the police within a small number of years, they came to the opinion later that it was a good idea.  

So what happened is the recording became compulsory in 1986. And one of the benefits of recording is of course that you, the interviewer and or your friend and or somebody else can listen to that recording to give you advice about what you did well, what you didn’t do well, where you could improve. And so what the government did is they commissioned four studies of these newly recorded interviews. Two were done by police officers working for their doctorates and two were done by researchers, not me on behalf of the government. So these four people got access to the recordings and they analysed different recordings but the four studies came to the same conclusion which was that the interviewing was not very good. And then when the chiefs of police said, my, dear: Why are they not very good?  

The obvious answer was people had received no guidance, no training. They’re just using their common sense. And so then the government of Chiefs Police said, we need to do something about this. So they commissioned 12 experienced detectives to form a committee to develop some kind of training. The first time training would ever occur and be formalised on a national basis in England and Wales. Relatively small countries. And whilst that committee of 12 male detectives was thinking of what to advise, they had a year or two to do it in. One of the detectives who had done one of the original studies listening to the recordings with his two supervisors was he was doing a PhD. He had a degree in psychology, his name was Tom Williamson. And so he had the idea that perhaps those 12 defectives who had to come up with some kind of training might benefit from being aware of some psychological principles about how best to communicate with people, et cetera. And so he, Tom Williamson, got together a small number of psychologists on Sundays and we collated anything that was of scientific value from any part of human behavior that might assist in the task of in a non-coercive way assisting a suspect to voluntarily decide to give you relevant information. And we had no idea whether this booklet of psychological stuff that we collectively produced, which was given to the committee of 12 male detectives, we had no idea at all what they would do with it. We suspected they would probably most likely put it in the bin because none of those detectives had a degree, none of those detectives were psychologists as such.  

But to us, complete and wonderful surprise, one day a large parcel arrived at my university office, which was from this committee of 12 detectives. And it was a heavy parcel. When I opened it, the covering letter said, Dear Professor, we have decided to incorporate into all our documents and training quite a lot of that psychological stuff that was passed to us, but because we have been instructed to write everything of a reading age of 16, because young police officers in those days didn’t have many school, if any, qualifications. So we had to write this psychological stuff in very basic language, and we are not sure that we have done justice to these complicated ideas. So could you go through what we have drafted and tell us where we’ve got it wrong? 

Well, I have to admit they got almost everything right. There was almost nothing they had misunderstood. And if I was grading that work, which I often do as a university professor, I would have given it the top mark. It was absolutely impressive how they had understood and brought into what they were proposing a whole load of psychological stuff.  

Ivar Fahsing:  

Fascinating. Well, I take it then that you were in that reference group that they actually got this material from. Could you tell a little bit how did you end up there? What was your background?  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, that’s a very good question. When I graduated with my bachelor’s, I started doing a PhD that had nothing to do with policing. But the person I was in love with, she won the university scholarship to do a PhD in psychology where we had graduated from. I didn’t get it, of course, because she was much better than me. But I got a funded PhD studentship in London, which was a journey of five hours away from the person with whom I was in love. 

And we decided to get married and therefore I even more didn’t want to be so far away from her. So I went to the professor where we had graduated, where she was doing a PhD. And I said, I know you don’t have any money, but my parents have no money, but we will somehow survive on one PhD studentship. So can I do a PhD here with the department I love, with the person I love? And he kindly said, yes, we can ask you to do a little bit of helping out in classes, but it won’t bring you very much money. And so I’m embarrassed to share with the world that in my first PhD year, all my friends would never let me buy a drink because they knew I didn’t have any money. And towards the end of that first year, the senior professor who had allowed me to do the PhD, start the PhD came to me and he said, he had just been awarded a research grant for one year in an area of psychology very different from what I was doing. And he would be very happy if I would agree to work with him because I would be paid. And I said, yes, sir, I’m very happy. And he said, well, don’t you want to know what it’s about? And I said, I don’t care what it’s about. And he said, it’s to do with the police. And I said, yeah, that’s fine. What is it? And he said, it’s to do with when police officers go on patrol before they leave the police station, they’re given information that’s relevant to that day. And in English, that’s called a daily operational briefing. And this project is to help the police make the information more memorable. So it’s a lot of psychological stuff in it. And I said, yeah, I’m interested in memory. That’s very good. So we started that project and I had to write reports every three months. Of course, the professor improved the reports to the Ministry of Policing and the ministry was very pleased. So they invited the professor and therefore me to continue for a second year in that arena. so much of what we did understandably wasn’t for 

for public knowledge, we published a few things and then some of the work I’d done in my first PhD year, because I had a brilliant supervisor, we had published a lot of that. And so the professors in my department said to me, well, Ray, they thought I was good psychologist. You’ve published quite a lot of stuff. You work with the police. It’s time for you to start applying for the lowest level of professorship, the most junior professorship. 

And I wanted to go back to London at that time, so I applied for jobs in London and I went for a job that related to what my PhD would have been about. And unknown to me, at the same time, they were looking for somebody to teach memory, which is what my police work was about, but we hadn’t published much about that. So another joyful part of my life was they offered me the job I did not apply for. They offered me a professorship in memory. So then I started working in memory and what psychologists worked on. I’m now talking about the middle and late seventies. There was a lot of research in psychology on what’s called eyewitness memory. How to help people when they’re shown a series of photographs not to choose the wrong one, but to choose the right one. So I worked quite a lot on that and that got me involved again working with the police. So I had a background in psychology and policing, which was why Tom Williamson, the police officer, who was a psychologist as well, who got the committee together on Sundays, he knew that I knew a little bit about policing and a reasonable amount about psychology. So he thought, I think correctly, that I could help him produce this document that he hoped the people coming up with the training would take notice of, which as I said, they did take notice of. So that’s how I got to that stage. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So they came up, assisted by you and other set-up scientists with the beginning of the PEACE programs. Could you say a little bit about your impression about how this program was received? 

Ray Bull: 

As I said, those 12 male detectives surprisingly had the skill to write about police interviewing and psychology in a way that was readily understandable. So the ability of other police to understand it, it may not agree with it, but to understand it was achieved by those 12 male detectives. A crucial thing had previously happened that I had an involvement in that I haven’t yet mentioned, which was that around 1980, there were some riots in cities in England, particularly in London, in which early career young patrol officers, who mostly looked like me, Caucasian, were stopping people who didn’t look like them, Afro-Caribbean teenagers, in parts of London, as is a part called Brixton. And so in the history of London and England, we talk about the Brixton riots. And there was an official inquiry into that. And the official inquiry concluded that these riots occurred because on the one hand, young male Caucasian police officers could not understand people from an Afro-Caribbean background. And the Afro-Caribbean people understandably also didn’t understand Caucasian beliefs. So this judge wrote this report saying that the training of early career police officers from now on for the first time should include what was called cultural awareness. And because the major riots were in London, the police organisation that piloted this additional kind of police training was the London Metropolitan Police. So they decided to enhance the curriculum that young police officers received by 30%. An extra 10 % was on cultural awareness, 10 % was on communication skills, and 10 % was what was called self-awareness. The better you understand yourself, the better you understand other people. And so the Metropolitan Police in about 1981, they began that training and then I was asked to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of that training initially for one year. And I had a really good researcher working with me called Peter Holcastle. And every year that one year project was extended. So we did that project for six years. at the end of the, therefore towards the end of the 1980s, I think partly in the light of the work we had done with the Met, the national government decided that all police officers had to have that training. And so when those detectives came up with the interviewing method, the PEACE method dated 1992, there had been a background initially in early career police officers taught by mid and senior career police officers, because we produced a curriculum. 

So fortunately there was a background awareness within policing, at least in England and Wales, that psychological things could be of benefit to them. So when the peace method was produced, for some officers, it made a lot of sense because that’s what they had learned earlier in their career. You know, that to get the best out of a person, if you’re a patrol officer, you need to treat them with a level of humanity and respect. If you want to move on five arrogant non-cooperative young men, you don’t hit them overhead with your police baton. You talk with them at a respectful level and then explain to them why it’s in the interest of everybody if they stop blocking the street and let people pass. So I think that’s one of the reasons why in my country, we had almost no resistance to this weird and wonderful idea that the detective had called the PEACE method. It was amazing how 

easily accepted the notions were of course some of the things within the method are quite difficult to do because of course you only need training if you don’t already do it. So there was no need to train police officers in how they should breathe because they already knew how to breathe and of course a number of officers have certain skills they bring to policing but things that the detectives learnt in psychology that are subsequently found to be very important in getting a guilty person decide voluntarily to tell you what they’ve done is something called the asking of open questions. In social life, men almost never ask open questions. Women, yes they do. But men, if they’re in a society which is historically of male dominance, they don’t tend to want everybody to give them information. They’ve already made up their mind. That’s the kind of gender bias that used to exist doesn’t exist anymore in my country. And so another thing that has subsequently been found by many people in the world to be important is that when you’re interviewing a person, you have good reason to believe has some relevant knowledge that might be implicate them as a guilty person. They may not be the bank robber, they might just be the driver. You’re trying to find out. 

So what the PEACE method advocates is treating even a person you think has committed a horrendous crime, you put aside your common sense. If I were interviewing a man that I had good reason to believe had sexually abused a lot of children, I want to hit him. I want to be an old style police officer. I want to torture him for the bad things I think he’s done, but I’m not yet sure. That’s why I’m interviewing. If I am a good interviewer, he may well decide to tell me what he’s done. Then I want to hit him even more because he’s now telling me about the first child he’s abused. But my PEACE training says I have to listen. I have to not show any judgment I have about negative things. I have to continue to have rapport with him, which means the ability to continue to converse. And in more recent research, I have to show what in psychology we call cognitive empathy. That means I show him that I understand how difficult it is to talk to me. I know from my planning of my interviewing that he himself when a child was abused and if he starts talking about that I respond to that in a constructive way. We know that 50 % of child abusers themselves were abused and I don’t excuse his behaviour but I resist the intent in my human desire to strangle him by continuing to talk with him and let him talk with me and when it gets a bit difficult, we revert back to what we chatted about at the beginning, which might be soccer or some other thing I know that he and I are interested in. So a lot of the peace method is the opposite of common sense and the opposite of what you would like to do to this terrible person that you’re interviewing. So some aspects of it are really difficult to do, but then never created a backlash against it. 

So as far as I’m aware, obviously I’m biased, but I’ve looked for backlash ever since. I’m not aware. And when we talk with other people, both within England and other countries, such as Norway and other countries that have adopted this same humane method, there seems to be once a police officer understands it, they are not resistant to it. The crucial thing is to get them to understand why you will get more information from somebody if you don’t punch them. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

The training was generally well received.  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, to a surprise and in fact it didn’t take long within the police service for to become a trainer of this interview was seen as a very elite thing to do. It was seen in the same category as other successes in policing and it wasn’t necessarily a route to promotion, but it was a route to being admired by others because now things are recorded when you interview suspects and other people listen to your recording. If you’re really good, they can tell you. And some people can become really, even men become really, really good at it. And so it became esteemed within the police service relatively quickly. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think also, I would like to ask you, you were really touched upon it. what was kind of, if you think, one thing is that they received it, see, and it also gave a certain status to be involved in it. Did it bring about any change?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, surprisingly, surprisingly, it did in two or three ways. So this new method was introduced as we said in the year 1992 and at that time in England and Wales there were 127,000 police officers. So of course they cannot all be trained in the first year or two. So what the chiefs of police decided to do was to have the training given to those who interview suspects in the most difficult circumstances. That’s either very senior crime or the suspect may have learning disability or be very aggressive kind of person. And so the people that would normally do that interviewing, because you need to do interview those people, they were the first to learn about and be trained in the peace method. And then the government asked me to analyse a very large sample of the interviews conducted by these people who were the first to be trained. And maybe they were well chosen to be the first trained, but in their interviews, they demonstrated the majority of the skills quite well. Understandably, they were weak. They were unable, particularly the men, to make most of their questions open. If you’re talking to a suspect with appropriate breaks for two or three hours, to continue to ask mostly open questions rather than suggestive or what’s called leading questions, which you do a lot in ordinary life, is extremely difficult. we were able to identify even in very good interviews, the things that they found difficult. And also in the sample of interviews, there were some skills that were required that almost everybody could do. 

So that helped revise the training because if everybody finds something easy to do, you don’t need to spend a lot of time in training on that because you know it’s quite easy to do. But the things that are important that are more difficult to do, you need to devote more training to that. So that kind of modified the emphasis in the training. And then that was mid 1990s. And then quite a few years passed in England before anybody had the willingness and ability to access these recorded interviews.  

And a very experienced crime investigator who worked in a government agency that investigated crime, a guy called David or Dave Walsh, contacted me one day and said he was finishing his career. He was in his mid-forties had enough years of experience to retire on a government pension but didn’t want to stay at home being bored and he wanted to do a PhD and when I said why do want to do a PhD he said I want to become a professor and myself being a professor I said you must be mad, it’s a terrible job. Behind the scenes students don’t see what an awful job it is behind the scenes. Dave said well okay. 

And of course, Dave, still working in the government crime agency, had access to hundreds and hundreds of interviews. So he was the first person who decided that he would analyse the interviews for two crucial things. On the one hand, how well each of the skills that is taught is performed. On the other hand, how much information the suspects gave that was of an incriminating, what we call investigative relevant information. 

And Dave did a series of studies within his PhD on these real life interviews. And he found that the more the interviews resembled a good quality PEACE interview, the more the suspects gave information, including in a democracy, the small percent of suspects who are genuinely innocent. And it’s very crucial not only to get information from the guilty, but to get information from the innocent that demonstrates that they are indeed innocent. so Dave did a series of studies and then some other people were beginning to adopt peace methods. Some parts of Australia, for example, followed of course some years later. No, before Dave’s PhD, Norway had already adopted the PEACE method. But I think Dave was the first to relate the amount of skill to the amount of information. And a number of other people, if they have access to recorded interviews, have done it in other countries. Some people with myself. So Dave’s interviews, understandably, because of the agency he worked for, were not of murderers and rapists. So I wondered to what extent, Dave was finding and others would apply in the more challenging kind of interviewing with people suspected of sex crimes or murder because of course if they tell the truth they know they’re going to go to jail for a long while. That fits with common sense. Why would a murderer or a child abuser voluntarily tell you knowing full well that in doing so, not only would they go to prison, but if they were a child abuser, their friends and family will probably disown them. And in the UK, if you go to prison for child abuse, the other prisoners try to abuse you. So it’s a very high risk situation. So after three years of trying with a PhD student called Samantha, we were able to access some real life recorded interviews with alleged murders and rapists. 

Basically, Samantha found the same thing, this strange thing which is called rapport, to establish a conversation with the person at the beginning based on their interests, and then to move on skillfully to talking about the alleged crime and to maintain rapport with them, as I’ve said earlier, when they’re telling you bad things is really difficult to do. in these high stakes, situations Samantha found the same thing as Dave that the better the interviewing matched onto the PEACE method, the more information people provided. And there’s been a series of studies and I’ll just finish with a very recent one. So with a PhD of the person of mine now, Dr. Bianca Baker. Bianca was always very interested because she has skills in psychotherapy on the role of demonstrating that you understand another person’s point of view. That’s called cognitive empathy. So what Bianca did was we got access to real life interviews with murder and rapists, a different sample. And she evaluated the interviewing for a number of things, particularly ability of the interviewer to demonstrate an understanding of the situation the interviewers found themselves. So it’s not emotional sympathy. It’s not getting upset or aggressive. 

It’s demonstrating an understanding. And what Bianca found again was in this highly skilled level of PEACE interviewing, which we call level three specialist investing. They are the only ones trained in cognitive empathy because they are the only ones who interview in difficult cases. She again found what Samantha found, what other people found, what they found, what other people in other countries have found. 

Though to untrain people who have the common sense view that to get information from a guilty person, you have to threaten them, you have to coerce them, you have to torture them, that’s the common sense view. To get people to understand the opposite is really, really difficult. But it seems to be effective and there are more and more countries and of course here in Norway for 20 years, you have had the wisdom of training in a way that science tells us is a much better way. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

As far as I know, this has been a game changer in Norway. a bit easier to introduce Norway than elsewhere because we already had a bachelor for the police, so the bridge between science and policing was already there in a way. It wasn’t kind of a new thing to be scientific, but we lacked areas of high relevance. And so I think this came at a very good time, but we needed something that was, you know, it was a lot of the theory that was a bit broader, a lot of technology was, and it wasn’t directly in the streets. But this, I think was, at least here in Norway. Could I ask you, Ray, again, thinking about all the years that you’ve been involved in this and and in so many different countries, cultures. Do you have an idea whether this model or approach in generally works everywhere? 

Ray Bull: 

Yes, I’ve been surprised that I’ve been lucky enough to go to several countries that in my previous earlier life. I never thought I would ever be lucky enough to go to various countries where you know, there has been quite a lot of torture and coercion by people who have not been given the knowledge that was given to people here in Norway and so of course depending on the culture, you present the information in a way that is of cultural relevance. 

So I don’t start off talking about the PEACE method in some cultures. I start talking about other meaningful situations in any culture where getting information from a person, getting them to do what you would wish them to essentially has the same skills as the detectives came up in the peace method. So that may seem a long winded answer. So I tried to make my introduction to it of some meaning to the audience outside of crime investigation and get them to understand why what I’m going to be talking about in the next two days not only applies in the interviewing of suspects or witnesses or victims, because some witnesses and victims don’t want to tell you everything either, how it’s not the only part of life where PEACE-like skills are important, those skills are important in many other aspects of life as well. So depending on the culture, it depends where I start. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I haven’t traveled as extensively as you, but also been fortunate enough to deliver this kind of training in many different cultures in Africa, Asia, South America. It seems, you know, it’s, it’s graspable and it’s natural for any culture, at least that I have seen.  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, as we said, it’s natural and other aspects of crime investigators life, which helps us explain to them that that natural skill is also relevant to interviewing suspects. That’s the challenge you and I have to get over for them to understand that listening, not interrupting, smiling, making sure when you ask a question it relates to what they’ve said, all those things that are important outside policing are also important in policing. 

But not everybody is good at it. That’s the problem.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It takes training and it’s a skill. And speaking about skill and implementation and, you know, we’re now in 2024. 

Ray Bull: 

Yes, it started 40 years ago when the government announced that in two years time the police would have to record. Yeah, it was 40 years ago that what was the most important first step occurred, which happened to be in my country. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

What would you say is the, if you were giving advice to someone, you know, from a country that taken on PEACE, what could they do to attract interest or to kind of start doing it? would you think they should start?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, the way I normally do that is to say. Let’s take the situation of entering a suspect or a crime victim. If you don’t do it well, on the one hand, you don’t gather enough information that would lead to the jailing of a true criminal. And so if you don’t do it well, the true criminal is still out there doing it. 

And in many societies, in one way or another, there are costs to that society and sometimes to the government of the health and wellbeing of victims. So one of the ways I start talking about it, particularly with senior people is I can save your government money. And they look at me very puzzled. These are professor of psychology is here going to talk about interviewing. So why is he starting off talking about saving money, because I know that one of the resistances in many countries to this training is this training cannot come cheaply. You cannot achieve it in a few hours so to have trainers and police not doing their duties, but being trained, cost money, you know, as they’re saying from somebody, best things in life are not cheap. So they worry about the upfront costs. But I point out to them that the better they are at getting information from suspects and witnesses and victims, the more crimes they solve, the more the right criminal is now in prison, the person who suffered the crime feels better because the way they were treated and the person that abused them is now in prison so they feel good about that so they don’t seek so much from the health service. So that’s one way I start off by saying I’m here to save you money. They always listen to that. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Professor Ray Bull thanks a lot.  

Ray Bull: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

We could be going on for days. I think that was a really good ending. Thank you.  

Ray Bull: 

So thank you, Ivar. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Today, we welcome a distinguished Mark Fallon, to our podcast “Beyond A Reasonable Doubt”. Warm welcome to you, Mark.  

Mark Fallon: 

Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be on with you, Ivar.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I don’t know where to start, Mark, with trying to give our listeners a short introduction of your professional background. But at least I can say that for me, you are the symbol of this development within the US. And I know that you have a background in the Investigation Service as a deputy commander there, you were deeply involved in the first modern terror attacks on the US and you also have been responsible for training on a national level for the federal agencies in the US. But maybe you could give our listeners a bit broader picture of what your professional background has been. And how you ended up in investigative interviewing.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the kind welcome. You know, I often describe interrogation, as a complex adaptive environment. It’s a longer continuum. And my career and trajectory has been along this continuum that has continued to thrust me into some very challenging situations where I’ve had to make some decisions and had to rely on expertise and knowledge that I did not necessarily have at the time. And that’s, know, being with NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, you know, that’s one of the hallmarks of that institution is providing support to the US Navy and US Marine Corps. And so when something happens, NCIS is the agency that conducts the criminal investigations, the counterintelligence work, or counterterrorism. And now cyber is certainly a much larger part than when I was on active duty. But they were the ones that were looked to solve issues so that the military can continue to function. And so during my career, that’s what happened. And it happened with the first World Trade Center attack. And I was involved in the case on what’s known as the blind shake, Omar al-Aqda al-Rakman, who’s a spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden. And then when the USS Cole was attacked, I led the USS Cole task force. I was at the time, I was the NCIS chief of counterintelligence for the Europe, Africa and Middle East divisions. 

And so I had that part of the world for NCIS for counterintelligence, the globe is divided into three different sections. Well, I had the sections that certainly were the most dangerous and most threatened with the Middle East and Europe and Africa, that particular area. And the principal job of that was threat warnings. So my division was co-located with the Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, the ATAC which provides the capability to alert Navy Marine Corps forces, the fleet, about pending threats. And this ATAC, it’s now called the MTAC, the Multiple Threat Alert Center, was actually created after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut when the after-action report determined that there was available intelligence that could have made the military personnel on the ground more prepared.  

But there was no ability to get it into the hands of those operators. And so the Navy turned to NCIS and said, establish this capability. And frankly, we failed. The USS Cole was attacked on the 12th of October, 2000. But there was actually intelligence available about potential small boat attacks. And we had that intelligence. And of course, 17 people, sailors died that day. 

 I became what NCIS called the commander of the USS Cole task force working with the FBI. And so it became a large undertaking for NCIS particularly, and really changed the organization. The ATAC turned it to the MTAC, and NCIS created its own counter-terrorism division, Directorate which at one time was under counterintelligence. And so that really thrust me into a major role in a top tier investigation into the Al Qaeda terrorist network, which during the first World Trade Center attack, I didn’t even know what Al Qaeda was. So now I’m thrusted to this. Then of course, when the 9-11 attacks occurred and President George W. Bush made the decision to utilize military commissions rather than the federal district courts to bring terrorists to justice. I was thrust into that and I was detailed from NCIS to the Department of the Army to work directly for the officer secretary of defense to establish a task force that had never been, there’s not been one like it before, to be the investigative arm of this new military commission process. And so in that capacity, had, okay, design a task force, who should be on it? What should your competencies be? How should you be aligned? What should be your command structure? What’s your report writing system? All of these, what building are you gonna be in? Things like that.  

And so when that occurred, I was the chief investigator for Al Qaeda for the United States, for the military commission process. So honestly, I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. You know, looking at the fact that, particularly the department of defense had turned to me to establish this task force and bring those that attacked us on September 11th to justice. That was our objective. The president said that the federal district courts, that system was impracticable to try terrorist. 

And it went to the commanding general of Army CID, the Army Criminal Investigation Division Command, which is the Army element responsible for criminal investigations, which is a different, the services all operate differently. And so the Army does not combine its counterintelligence capabilities with its criminal investigation capabilities. The way FBI does, the way NCIS does or Air Force OSI does, the Army equivalent didn’t. And so Army CID did not have the depth of knowledge or experience working within the intelligence community because that wasn’t within their primary portfolio. And so when I was detailed Army CID, I had to kind of help them understand what it’s like working within the intelligence domain. 

And so when I established my specific investigative units, they each contained criminal investigators, intelligence analysts. Each unit had their own lawyer because of the unique laws that might apply. And each had an operational psychologist or behavioral scientist. And Army had not traditionally had done that. 

NCIS during my career had made very effective use of operational psychologists to support the operators. And so when I got this mission to establish a task force, investigative task force, the first, one of the first things I did was say, I need to draw upon a base of knowledge that I don’t have. And so I established what we call the behavioral science consulting team or the “Biscuit”. So we brought in an expertise that we did not have. And that included bringing in operational psychologists from other entities within the intelligence community, including the CIA, to help us design the methodology that we would use to conduct our interviews and interrogations. Because this is unlike anything we had had before. I mean 3000 people were killed on, you know, in the World Trade Center. I mean, the Pentagon was attacked. I mean, plane was downed in Chancho, Pennsylvania that was destined to hit the Capitol. And so the U.S. was being attacked, both economically. New York City, the economic hub of the United States. Militarily, the Pentagon, and our government itself, the Capitol. And so this was attack on democracy, on our way of life here in the US. And we were filled with rage. And decisions at the time, were based, in my opinion, on fear, fear of the next attack, fear of what happened. 

 Ignorance, really not understanding the nature of this attack, and arrogance, thinking that we can just do this, what we did with the EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) program and reditions, that we would be able to do this, and no one would ever know. 

That just is an unrealistic expectation and this is what many people don’t understand is that the matter in which that we started was everyone had to receive our training program and how to conduct these interviews interrogations before they deployed, before they actually engage in it. And it was all report based. It was all about establishing your report. It was about understanding the Middle Eastern mindset. It was the exact opposite of what the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, EIT was. And while operational psychologists from the intelligence community, including the CIA, were helping me establish rapport-based investigative and interrogation methodologies because we knew them to be the most effective, the CIA outsourced torture to contract psychologists who had no background in al-Qaeda, no interrogation experience, and really took them down a road that created incredible problems for the US. But what was unique about these investigations from a criminal investigator perspective, normally when a crime occurs you have a crime scene and you have suspects. In this case, we had suspects and we didn’t know what crime they may have committed, right? Because we sweeped up all these people and now we had them in custody and now we need to determine what they might have done. Not only for potential prosecution, but for release and, and my task force, more investigators conducting cases that led to the exoneration or release of detainees. 

Then, I worked for the prosecution. Overwhelming majority of them did nothing. Because the people that really were the most culpable were taken to black sites rather than turned over to criminal investigators. 

I know this is a long story to your question, but what that did is that, this is what kind of really was the catalyst for the movement here in the US. And so what happened was there was a recognition within the government much earlier on before the public knew and within those of us working the cases, much earlier on than the rest of the government knew that the manner in which we were conducting interrogations, particularly the EIT program, was counterproductive. It was not only ineffective in getting accurate, reliable information, it was getting unreliable information. It was getting inaccurate information and uninformed and flawed decisions were being made based on that. And so, when in 2006, 2005, 2006, the President Bush wanted to try to solve that problem. We had all these people at Guantanamo that should have not been there in the first place. 

We had tremendous resources focused on trying to get them repatriated, released, transferred, because they didn’t belong at GITMO. And we were assuming liability for them. We were holding people that didn’t belong there and certainly losing credibility in the international community, because it was clear high-ranking Al Qaeda members. 

These were people who were, I call them in my book, bounty babies, right? Who we paid a bounty for people who we suspected may be extremists. And we purchased a lot of people, I called it human trafficking in my book, right? And so we purchased them and we sent in a GITMO and now we had to kind of sort through them there. And so that effort, the Office of Director of National Intelligence commissioned a study, and it was called, Inducing Information. And that study was conducted by Dr. Robert Fine and Brian Voskull, who were both members of the behavioral science consulting team that I established. So these are some of the people that I brought in to help understand the nature of the beast, to help understand how we should conduct interrogations, to help understand the risk of potentially releasing or transferring them, And so, as I said, my experience in NCIS was, I don’t have all this knowledge, I need to draw upon the knowledge of others, so I can make an informed decision for the Navy leadership or in this case, the Department of Defense leadership about a direction to take. That study was the…, and they came to FLETC when I was there, I was the director of the NCS Academy and the assistant director for training to the Federal Office of Training Center. And the study came there and said, we would like to look at the manner in which you train investigators. And we invited them in and they looked and they went to the FBI Academy and they went to local police academy, went to Boston Police Department, and what they discovered in the US here, it had been more than 50 years since the US government had invested any significant resources into why somebody would talk to us. Right now in Europe, be it at PACE and PEACE and things going on in Europe, you guys were much further along in the research basically because of abuses with the IRA and then, and so the overreaction of the state is what caused kind of the shift in mindset in Europe, right? And that’s the same thing in the US. The overreaction of the state caused a study of it, which said, wait a minute.  

And so, what happened then is in 2009 when President Obama was elected to office, one of his first executive orders in his first days of presidency, 13491, said, we won’t torture anymore. However, we need to understand, we need to know the best methods to elicit accurate and reliable information to protect our national security. 

Right. And this is what’s a little different than the PEACE foundation from the foundation here in the US with the HIG, the The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group which was formed as a result of that executive order, is that the focus, the primary foundation in Europe was a human rights focused to get information. 

The foundation within the United States is we need to protect our national security, but we need to do it lawfully. And so just a little bit of shift in the inflection and the focus. And this is why I take exception when I hear people who are afraid to say the word interrogation, which is benign, is the fact that that entire apparatus was for intelligence interviewing. Right. It wasn’t for investigative interviewing. 

And then of course, an interview is an interview is an interview, right? And so there’s really no difference between it. So, it’s about effective interviewing, right? And when you’re conducting, this is what we had to do was you had to elicit information and you needed the most data. 

And then I often equate it to if you work cyber and you work in computers, everything’s a one or a zero, right? You’re getting ones and zeros. And that’s the same thing when in interview, you’re getting ones and zeros. How you apply it, it might be intelligence. It might be evidence. It might just give you a better understanding of something. And so the goal is to conduct an effective interview to elicit data that can be analyzed and then applied. It may be applied to exonerate somebody. It may be applied to make a more informed decision about where to apply resources, things like that. And so this movement in the US was created because of interrogational abuses. The movement in Europe was created because of interrogational abuses. 

And so the goal is to learn from those lessons. And that is what really started what we have here in the US was the high-value detainee interrogation group at the high level. And for me, I was thrust into that because I was asked to be on the HIG research committee and be its first chair and to help with the instruction of the first interrogators to go through the HIG training program. And so for the first time, I started to really get involved in a collaborative effort with researchers rather than just using the product, what I understood about it or what somebody else told me about it, but really working alongside of researchers. 

And I wrote a piece in Applied Cognitive Psychology when they had a special edition on interview interrogation talking about how collaboration between scientists and practitioners will improve the practice and will improve the science. Because it was clear to me that many of the researchers didn’t understand the practice. They really didn’t. And when I see the manner in which some studies are designed, it’s clear to me that they don’t. And it’s clear to me that practitioners don’t understand research. And so the whole goal is to kind of bridge that gap so that these two work to assist each other’s objectives. And so the research will better inform the practice but the practice will better inform the research as well. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Mark, a couple of times you have said: in my book, because the first piece I read from you, to be honest, was a book called “Unjustifiable Means”. Could you tell us a little bit about why did you write that book and what is it about?  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, that’s a great question, Ivar, because I never thought of myself to be a writer. I wasn’t one of the people who always wanted to write a book. 

Frankly, I don’t enjoy writing. I’m an emotional writer. I write when I get pissed off. And so what kind of thrust me into the public domain, as someone who speaks out was really my involvement with the HIG. 

I was speaking out about what was effective, what wasn’t effective about, and what I was talking about while it was true and accurate was very different than the public perception of what happened because the public was misled, right? It was misled intentionally that the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, program was safe, was necessary, was effective, because that was their talking points, to try to shirk any accountability for it, to try to say, this is why we were so great. And so a group called Human Rights First came to me. 

And they had a program where they were trying to counter torture and said, we need your voice. Because we need you to publicly say what you’re saying here in these meetings. 

They asked me to speak out and Jose Rodriguez, who was the chief of the counterterrorism center of the CIA, when this EIT program, and while they call it EIT, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, I call it what it really was, excuses to inflict torture. And so that’s what the program really was, is just trying to come up with the excuse is we’re under threat and it’s safe. What we’re doing safe, and we know it wasn’t, what we’re doing is effective, and we know it wasn’t, what we do is necessary. We know all that wasn’t the case. But the narrative was that it was that, and Jose Rodriguez was writing a book called Hard Measures where he was trying to claim credit about all the great stuff they did. And so Human Rights First came to me and said: will you write an op-ed? 

And I wrote one in Huffington Post that said, you know, you know, the torture is illegal, immoral, ineffective, and inconsistent with American values. Right? and we brought together a number of interrogation professionals from the Intel community and from the law enforcement community. I mean, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lieutenant General Stoyer, former chiefs of station of the CIA, who all said that interrogation is wrong. And so we put out a statement of principles for President Obama, and I became kind of the lead for the National Security Professionals Program of Human Rights First, trying to get the narrative changed within the media, and we did. 

We met with members of the press. We met at the New York Times, The Washington Post and said, please stop the narrative that human rights advocates call this torture. Torture is torture. 

A lot of people encouraged me to write my story because it’s much different than the public narrative about this at the time. And I was at an event when I met with John McCain, who was really one of my heroes and he knew of what I had done, on the CITF because the CITF was the one that discovered, the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, prisoner 63, would have been the 20th hijacker and that of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, prisoner 760, who wrote the book, The Guantanamo Diaries. And so I was the one that alerted the senior leadership of the DOD and the Navy that these methodologies that were supposed to be done in secret within the CIA were migrating to the Department of Defense. And as the most senior counterterrorism official responsible for investigating them, I had an obligation to alert my chain of command of this because it was clear in my mind that this would be contrary to the president’s military order of November 2001 that said we would treat prisoners humanely. And so I had an order that I was executing that said we would treat prisoners humanely and was clear that others were not. And John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, both I spoke to them at a Human Rights First event where they were both being celebrated because we had just gotten the release of the torture report. And so Human Rights First asked me to speak out and encourage them to release the torture report executive summary. 

This is like 500 some odd pages of a 10,000 page report, right? That’s still highly classified. you know, we were trying to say we needed to, we need to get this report out so that we learned some lessons from it, right? Because we did some really horrible things. I mean, the depths of depravity of the program are still coming out. But we need to do this. And John McCain said, you need to write your book. You know, your story needs, people need to understand what happened, you know, with you and your task force it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t a whistleblower. I was a high ranking government official saying this is this is wrong, right? This is a bit. This is contrary to our values, contrary to law. And I have an obligation, I have a duty and obligation to try to prevent that and so that’s what really propelled me to write it. My intent was to write it as a leadership book, right? To try to have people take a look at it, to see what it was like having to make some decisions that were frankly unpopular, right? To oppose the secretary of defense, to oppose the president and vice president at a time when people were under threat and afraid and to feel that the commitment to the oath of office was more important than my career, right? Understanding that that position would probably derail my upward mobility, right? And it could result in sanctions. I was the deputy commander of CITF. The commander was an Army Colonel, Britt Malo. And we actually sat down and discussed whether he could be court-martialed for this, or could I be brought up on charges or fired? But we sat down with our lawyers and made decision that we have an affirmative obligation not to follow an unlawful order. 

And it was clear to us that the order to inflict human rights violations against a prisoner in custody was unlawful. There is no way that that is lawful order. And so whether we liked it or not, and whether it had an adverse consequence on us or not, we had an obligation to stand up and take whatever consequences happen. And so I wanted the book to be that leadership lesson for others who might be in a position like me in the future. 

And so through my career, I often would find myself to talk truth to power. And that was a distinct advantage that I had and NCIS had because others within the military structure all reported to those local military commanders. And so I may have had a little more flexibility in my ability to say not just “no”, but “hell no”. You know that this isn’t going to happen on my watch because it was clear to me that I was the senior NCIS person involved and Guantanamo was a naval station, that crimes are going to be committed on a naval installation under my watch. And so I had to let the Navy leadership know that this was going to happen having no idea frankly that anyone would actually consider doing this and thinking it would produce positive results. I actually thought that this was just some inapt generals or people at lower levels who thought they were doing good but didn’t understand an actual interview interrogation and didn’t kind of think through the strategic implications down the road what might happen if they did so. So when I challenged what was happening, I didn’t know it was already policy. I didn’t know the depths of depravity or the fact that the CIA was already doing some really horrible things in these dark prisons and black sites. It was inconceivable to me at the time. And it’s still amazing now that we would have engaged in that. Because it is so abhorrent and so contrary to our values as a country, as a country that is founded on human rights. 

The tone of my book changed during the presidential primaries where Donald Trump and the Republican candidates started to say that torture was effective and we’ll go back to torture and something worse that will restore Guantanamo. 

I really wanted it to be a book that someone could look at and understand what really happened on the inside. I’m not some researcher who’s read a bunch of stuff and then tried to… This happened to me, right? This was my life. I mean, I was at these meetings. I was there in the heat of the battle at the tip of the spear. So it wasn’t my analysis of what somebody else did. This was me just telling what I could of a story. 

And nothing in the book is classified. would not divulge classified information. Just wouldn’t do it. I used to investigate people who had done that. Exactly. But the redactions in my book were there. There’s 113 redactions. And my book was held up 179 days before publication because what I write is embarrassing.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So I’ve seen all that and I thought all that was kind of because it was secret.  

Mark Fallon: 

No, none of it was. I mean, things from congressional hearings that I wrote about were redacted. Articles in newspapers that I wrote about were redacted because it told a story that was more compelling or had more sources applied to what I was saying that made my story more palatable rather than just my story. And as an investigator, what do you do? You look for supporting evidence. And so that’s some of the things that were redacted is me finding some of those things that supported what I was contending in the book. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And indeed, for investigators, a narrative is what is supposed to connect the evidence and make it a coherent case.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah. I’m frustrated at how little of the practitioners, got it, and were trying to apply it, there was no kind of cultural assimilation. This wasn’t taking hold as meaningful. The police were not accepting the behavioral sciences, the psychological sciences in the same manner in which they accepted the physical sciences, like DNA, right? They accept DNA, but they’re not kind of getting that the psychological sciences have value to apply as well. And they looked at this and what they did is they said, listen, here’s the thing, there’s two different cultures at work here. Right? You have practitioners operating in this operational silo. You have academics operating in this silo. And neither really understand each other. You know, there’s some isolated circle, say, where they do. But as communities, they do not. As communities of research, communities of practice, they don’t have a good understanding. And they do not work well together. And the problem is…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The relationship has been called the conversation of the deaf. It gets too messy when people like you and me get involved Mark. Yeah, it becomes uncomfortable because we challenge the norm. We’re in it for the application and the value and the complexity that guys like you and me have to deal with. It’s messy.  

But as you say, and that’s probably that might be a reason why by these two silos still seems to thrive as as just that. 

Mark Fallon: 

But what we did is we commissioned a book, and we found a publisher who would agree that the electronic version would have no paywalls. So we went around the world and we picked a number of researchers that we thought could have the most impact on practice. Pär Anders Granhag. He’s one. I mean, we looked at the cognitive area. Let’s ask Ron Fisher to write a chapter on the cognitive interview. We want to talk about research methodologies. We went to Melissa Rossano. We want to talk about memory and other things. We went around the world and we picked who do we think could kind of contribute to this. 

And we said, write this with practitioners in mind. And so we, just this past December, it was published, interviewing and interrogation, a review of history of research and practice since World War II, because we wanted to have something that could create a cognitive opening within practitioners that this psychological science, that this body of research could help them do their job better. And each of the chapters can be downloaded separately and it is available at no cost.  

And so that’s what’s kind of exciting and encouraging now is that there are these pockets of excellence in policing. Los Angeles is doing some incredible work. I just had a call yesterday with a district attorney, a prosecutor, a Vern Pierson in El Dorado County, California, who has established his own interrogation training program for investigators because he was getting bad data. Right as a prosecutor, he wasn’t getting the type of information from the interrogation that he needed to try cases. So, and he brings ORBIT as a foundational aspect of it. And he has a program and he’s trying to rewrite legislation in California to ban the false evidence ploy. Right, and I work now with the Innocence Project and I’ve now testified before 10 different state legislators to try to get them to evolve from the traditional confession-driven methodologies that we know produce false confessions, that we know are less effective in obtaining accurate, reliable information than the science-based methods, but that are still being utilized. And when I talk to police organizations or before legislative bodies, when the police are afraid you’re taking our tools away. No, no, we’re replacing your antiquated tools. You wouldn’t issue a firearm that haphazardly misfires and hits unintended targets and innocent victims, nor should you with your interrogation program. Because what you’re doing is haphazardly getting false results and you’re getting wrongful convictions. 

Which is horrible in and of itself but it’s a menace to society because the actual perpetrator remains on the street to prey on other victims and your law enforcement officers, particularly with a false evidence ploy where you’re lying about what the evidence is you’re promoting a culture of deceit and deception in a law enforcement organization. You’re saying it’s okay to lie, to witness. Not just suspect, but somebody you suspect, they may be a witness, but I’m gonna lie to them about the facts and try to see if they’re a suspect. And they go back to their community and say, the police just lied to me and said they had me on camera and I wasn’t even there. And so we talk about in the US how, you know, there’s a lack of trust in policing that were challenged by recruitment and retention of police officers. 

Well, when you’re deceiving the public the trust factor just isn’t there right? How do you then when you go back to your community say please lie to me? So I advocate policing with virtue, like the police should be the good guys. You should police with virtue because that’s a step closer to community to embrace policing. You want your  community to embrace police? You know, we’re there for the force of good and and so it should be embraced for a sounder criminal justice process, so that’s what I have.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You probably can go beyond that, I guess, Mark, and say that for general dignity and mutual respect and understanding as human beings.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, that’s one of the aspects we hit on in the Mendes Principles about professionalism. And so we spend, you know, when I was at NCIS, I spent a lot of time in the firing range, right? I had to continuously qualify, re-qualify quarterly to ensure I was proficient with a handgun that I may have pulled, but never fired, you know, in the line of duty. But I did an interview interrogation just about every day. Never had to reestablish my proficiency. Never had any, you know, had any mandatory follow-on training. You know, there was voluntary training and there was training provided in that area. But it wasn’t looked at as something that you could add new competencies to. Because you didn’t know that this research was ongoing. And of course at the time we didn’t have this research. But now there is. It was like, if there was some new firing technique that made your judgment better, or made your weapon better, or made you a better shot or a better marksman or have better gun fighting skills, it would be in your training program so that you were more accurate. Well, we have research now that can ensure that you’re more accurate in your interviews and interrogations. However, other than pockets of excellence, it’s not being implemented. 

LAPD was the first people that I helped train, they’ve gone out now and they’re doing training in those programs. FLETC, Federal Enforcement Training Center, the largest law enforcement training center in the US here, has totally revamped their training program and now uses science to train all the federal agents that they train within the US, which they didn’t do before. 

And so I am very pleased to see those changes. NCIS, my former organization, the director had come out to the field, said, I don’t care how you’ve previously been trained. 

I don’t care how your previous practice has been, from this day forward, we will only use research to inform our practice of interviewing interrogation. And so we’re hoping for a greater paradigm shift. 

Where there has not been that same type of culture adaptation is in the state and local law enforcement level in the US here, unfortunately. We don’t have a central law enforcement authority in the US. Every state can be different within the same county. A county could have different protocols than a city. And so there’s no kind of central authority. And so what you hope to do is influence. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I guess one of the fundamental, you’re pointing to the system of how the entire law enforcement community is built up in the US, which of course is quite different at least from where I come from, Norway, where as you’re probably aware of, it’s a bachelor program that leaves room for much more critical reflection and foundation for every single officer. And of course, that creates a better outset, I guess, for this kind of embracing and also merging the silos. I guess from the very beginning, there is no conflict between practice and research because that’s your mother milk.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, you have a much greater emphasis as it should be on education. We do not overhear, I mean, NCIS requires a college degree. Some other agencies do not. So you don’t have that kind of educational focus to kind of advance that way and to be able to engage in scholarships simultaneously because it does impact your practice. 

You’re a better practitioner because of your knowledge. You’re a better practitioner because of your scholarship.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly. still, have this… I remember very vividly, Mark, when it was introduced in Norway, a bachelor in policing. Because I was the second-last class without it. So I remember when I think I was probably one of them being really worried about all these nerdy theoretical guys who were supposed to follow us and how would they be able to both read books and do the job. there is this thing and I think it’s not because you’re against it, it’s genuine worry that we’re doing an important job and we have to make sure we’re doing it the right way. So don’t think it’s like they don’t really respect it, but it’s built on a genuine worry that we know how to do it. And we might take some advice, but we won’t throw it all overboard to someone who have never done it before.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, and the other part is kind of the op tempo here. I mean, you know, in NCIS, very operational, a lot going on. You know, I was always engaged in, you know, high level task force, high level investigations. There wasn’t a lot of time. Right. And so there was a program where you could attend the Naval War College one year and get a master’s degree. But there was never enough time to give a year out of my operational world to kind of take that break. And, you know, and so the people who got it. 

Were the ones that may have been between assignments Or could have had the time to attend those things, but you know through my career there was never enough time but you know in Norway, it’s part of your culture right that that that that is part of what is it accepted that would make you a better leader And certainly, you know, I went through leadership training in NCIS They realized that that that type of That type of training made me a better leader attending those schools But it’s that level of kind of research that is kind of a separate silo. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly, but I think also what happens is, you know, slowly, slowly, societies are developing into higher and higher education for on average. And if the police and the law enforcement don’t follow, we will fall behind. And, you know, you won’t be taken seriously by the people you’re supposed to serve. 

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, there are exceptions. mentioned, I don’t have a PhD. I have a bachelor’s degree, right? Yet I have an experience base that helps my knowledge, right? So I have a high degree of knowledge that hasn’t resulted in a degree, right? I guest lecture at a lot of law schools. I guest lecture for psychologists and I guest lecture for lawyers. So there are folks who will embrace…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

That says a lot of what your work has meant, Mark. And the reason why we’re having you as a guest on our podcast is exactly that. You are exceptional in the way that you are able to convey this message to so many different audiences that can bring about change. So I would just like to ask you before we round off, from where you go, you are probably the scholar, because I think about you as a scholar, who are invited to the most important places in the world. You visit places and offices and talk to decision makers far more than any other scholar that I know. From your point of view, where is the wind blowing right now? 

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, I’ve been very, very encouraged recently. It was Saul Kassin who insisted that the Innocence Project contact me. And so he… for years has been saying you’re, know, they were in their echo chamber as well. Right. And so they didn’t go to practitioners for the most part. And so I said, you need to hear Mark Fallon speak because his voice is unique. Right. From probably what you’re hearing. And, you know, they have asked me now to speak, as I said, 10 different state legislatures. 

And I’ve done press conferences with them in the ACLU. And I oftentimes speak with an exoneree sitting next to me, someone who falsely confessed to a crime they didn’t commit. And I’ll start my presentation by saying, I used to believe that an innocent person wouldn’t confess to a crime they didn’t commit. I was wrong. And he’s going to tell you why I was wrong. And then they will tell their story or something like that. 

And so I speak for a number of different innocence projects. And they bring me out and I speak to legislators. I’ll speak to police organizations and i’ll talk then about some of the things that I’m talking to you about you know in telling maybe truth of power, but try to create this cognitive opening that what you understand or what you believe? May be different right? We once thought the world was flat You know, we want you know, you know some things that some our beliefs change right, but these cognitive openings are occurring within the state legislatures to a degree. Now I’m very encouraged, Minnesota just signed a bill banning deception and police interrogations with juveniles. There’s no state that has banned it with adults yet. Now some departments won’t do it, but there’s not a legislative ban on it, which I think it needs to be to really have the cultural change because of the damage that it’s the people don’t realize the damage it’s done financially. So within the U.S. exonerees have been awarded four billion dollars in settlements, four billion. Right. And so the problem with that, that’s not impacting individual police departments. It’s impacting their city’s budgets. It’s impacting the state’s budget, it is impacting the taxpayers. But that’s not filtering down to the city budget, because those cases usually aren’t completed till 20 years after the person’s had a wrongful conviction. Right. So those those officers who involved in that have moved on. There’s no accountability, things like that. And so most recently, within the last year, the NCJFCJ, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges reached out to me. And they were encouraged to talk to me. And one of the judges on their steering committee for their conferences, which usually brings 600-700 judges together from around the country, basically told me, you don’t realize how ignorant we are as judges about what you’re saying. And I teased her and said, well, I think I do. 

But they they brought me out to speak at their conference last february in Cleveland Ohio and I spoke with the co-founder of the innocence project Peter Neufeld talking about their efforts nationally and with Terrill Swift and exoneree who i’ve spoken with before to the judges and the feedback was exceptional and so the judges are now saying, wait, I’m saying you are making bad decisions. Right. You’re making decisions. Your prosecutors are making decisions based on information that’s being involuntarily obtained. Right. That they are being coerced and so you’re making bad judgments and here are the results of those. $4 billion is being paid out, you know, here in this state.  

I’ve been asked to participate in a movement coming up in the state of Pennsylvania to just have police record their interrogations. Right, that they still don’t record. NCIS was the first federal agency to mandate recording interrogations. And they didn’t do it for human rights purpose. They did it because of what we call it the CSI effect. Jurors watch TV. They think something should be this way. So we were afraid that jurors weren’t believing our rapport-based methods. So we wanted to videotape it so they could see that the interrogation was really voluntary. We wanted them to see that our practice was a rapport-based practice. And so that’s the encouraging. So what we’re hoping is that we get to a point where, frankly, the public will no longer tolerate in that practice, that police administrators will no longer tolerate that their practice may be contributing to the degradation of trust between police and the communities they serve. That the public itself will no longer tolerate deceptive police practice. They will insist upon the fact that police should be professional and that they should actually be utilizing science to inform and to reform the practice of interviewing interrogation. Well, there are indications and warnings that there could be a cultural shift.  

But we have to keep the pressure on. We have to continue. We can’t rest on our laurels. We can’t say, I wrote this book, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. We have to say that this is an evolutionary process. I was discouraged for a long time about the inability for the HIG research to trickle down. Now I am encouraged. I am encouraged by what I hear and what I see around the country in pockets. 

I’ll be really delighted when I see kind of the cultural transformation away from confession-driven to information gathering, and then the understanding that science can inform the practice and make us better at what we do. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I feel confident, Mark, as long as you are around, that wind will continue blowing. Just talking to you today have encouraged me that also there is time to get you back to Europe again, because the way you are able to deliver a message is absolutely unique. So first of all, I have to say that, and you know I mean it. And I also have to thank you as a fellow citizen of the world that for all the time you’re spending on actually making this change come through I would like to round off this interview with asking you the question. Do you sometimes have a feeling that you are naive, that you are trying to fight windmills? Or why are you doing this?  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, I’m a smart Alec from New Jersey, so the short answer is I don’t have any hobbies. Or I don’t know any better. You know, my whole life has been dedicated to public service. I mean, I’ve only known really kind of government service. 

My father was a police officer, deputy chief of police. My father-in-law is my father’s partner. My grandmother was the town clerk in my town. My uncle was a councilman, so I’m not, while I believe in capitalism, not motivated by profit. I feel that citizens of the world, you know, I like Roosevelt’s quote, you know, he talks about the man in the arena and everyone remembers that card, but he also said that citizens in a republic have a responsibility. And he said that, you know, that high tide raises all boats. And so what I do realize is how unique my voice is. 

And I realize it’s because of those experiences, right? It’s not, it’s because I was thrown into situations and had to survive, right? And with the recognition that, to survive, I’ve had to rely on others, right? And so now, you know, I’m 68 years old. I realize I have much more time behind me than I have ahead of me that my voice is one that has some type of meeting now. And I will continue to speak out as long as I’m relevant and as long as my message is for the forces of good, for the lack of a better term. So I’ll continue to use my voice and my pen or my background and expertise to try to be something that could inform society because I think that that’s citizens in a republic have that obligation as Roosevelt said and so and I believe I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and I don’t believe anyone’s ever kind of taken that oath away from me. So I feel that some of the things that are practiced have been collectively unconstitutional, right, tortures unconstitutional and so hopefully, what I say will resonate with certain people who will then carry that message on. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I feel certain it will, Mark. So by that, I would thank you so much for taking your time to get this into you today.  

Mark Fallon: 

Well, it is a genuine honor, Ivar, to do this. I am encouraged by what you have done and what you are doing, your voice. So thank you for the opportunity to use my voice on your podcast and to be invited to spend some delightful time with you.