When Training Isn't Enough
I am proud of my legacy within the FBI and the U.S. Intelligence Community, having developed the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) science-based interviewing protocol. I worked on this for at least ten hours a day for ten years and spent my entire career looking for ways we could all be better. And I continue to do so; thus, it hits me in the gut when I read something that shows what little progress we seem to have made.
I do think we have made great progress in law enforcement interviewing, but stories like below remind me why I focus so much on mindset and how much further we have to go. With the wrong mindset, no matter how good the training, we are still going to get it wrong, predictably and repeatedly.
Before I dive into this case, the Netflix series #AmercianNightare has suddenly garnered a lot of attention and people have been reaching out to me about it. And it is another gut punch. Shortly before that investigation happened I delivered a course in San Francisco and I’m about 80 percent confident the agent involved went through that course. I didn’t fully understand the mindset part at that point, but it still hurts because with the training we provided, that case should not have evolved as it did.
And yet it did. So there is more that we need to address than just the “how to” aspects of interviewing.
The Case That Shouldn't Have Happened
In May 2022, FBI agents raided the Fresno, CA home of John Niblick, an autistic man with muscular dystrophy, based on an IP address that linked his computer to bomb threats made to schools in Wisconsin and New Jersey. John Niblick had never visited either state, would have no reason to know the schools in question existed, nor would he have any reason to make bomb threats against them. In short, Niblick had absolutely nothing to do with the bomb threats and yet an FBI agent spent hours accusing him of having committed the crime and of lying.
Should the FBI have raided his house with drawn weapons in the early morning hours. Doubtful. Should they have knocked on the door and talked to him and asked to examine his computers and phone? Should they have interviewed him with a focus on gaining accurate information? One-hundred percent. I write this looking at the nameplate I was given as a new agent at Quantico and now as a retired agent I still genuinely love the FBI. But in this case we messed it up and it was not just bad interviewing, it was also a case of the wrong mindset.
Interview Failures
Lying About Evidence
During the interview, the FBI agent told Niblick (in Niblick’s words), "there was already more than enough ample evidence to show that I was the criminal." This is clearly a lie. If there was ample evidence, they would be arresting him, not conducting a search warrant and questioning him in his home.
Lying during an interview is not a strategic interview technique. Adding inaccuracies to the narrative makes it almost a certainty that we will gain inaccurate information. The primary purpose of an interview is to gain accurate information. It is not to craft a narrative that we like.
The "Baselining" Fallacy
The agent accused Niblick of lying and played for him voice recordings of the bomb threats that he said proved guilt. The voice on the recordings was not Niblick’s but was a digitally altered voice.
When Niblick began shaking after hearing the recordings, the agent claimed this proved his guilt saying, "Obviously you must've done it because you started shaking when I played the recordings. But when I asked what you wanted to major in in college you weren't shaking at all."
This is one of the most profound misunderstandings of human behavior – the idea that we will act the same way in non-stressful and stressful situations. That we would do so should make sense to no one, and yet, so many interviewers, within the stress of an interview, fall back on this idea and ignore the many other causes of a change in behavior.
In this case, Niblick was likely shaking because:
He has muscular dystrophy, which can cause tremors,
He's autistic, making him more sensitive to stress,
He was being accused of a serious crime, and
He was terrified.
A competent interviewer would have recognized these obvious explanations and, with the right training, would know that, as Vrij (2016) and others have pointed out, “for baselining to be useful for determining veracity, it is important that the statements are comparable to the investigative questions in terms of stakes, content, context, and cognitive and emotional load.” What courses Niblick took in college does not remotely meet this criteria. Nor do most questions so it is a really difficult and largely inaccurate way to determine veracity.
Mindset Failures
I could train this agent on proper interview techniques, but I wonder – would he still resort to the same tactics under stress? Quite possibly, because the issue runs deeper than knowledge.
Insecurity
When investigators lack confidence in their case or their abilities, they fall back on deception and intimidation. The interviewer knows he doesn’t have the evidence, and thus is insecure and unsure where to go with the conversation, so he falls back on false claims of having all of the evidence.
Some agents become so psychologically invested in being "right" that admitting error becomes almost impossible. Their identity as competent investigators gets tied to specific outcomes rather than honest processes. When your self-worth depends on this suspect being guilty, any evidence can be made to fill that need.
Cognitive Bias
This agent also displayed classic confirmation bias. Once he decided Niblick was guilty (probably before entering the room), everything became evidence supporting that conclusion. The shaking wasn't a stress response to being accused of a serious crime; it was proof of guilt. The autism and muscular dystrophy weren't relevant medical conditions; they were irrelevant distractions from the agent’s predetermined narrative.
In addition, likely the initial piece of evidence was the IP address coming back to this location and the interviewer anchored on that as accurate information and the key piece of information. Lacking the ability to un-anchor, anything that contradicted the narrative was heard as irrelevant or simply not heard.
Self-Awareness
Great interviewing requires high self-awareness, and it also demands intellectual humility – the ability to tolerate uncertainty and admit you might be wrong. In this case, as clues accumulated that the agents may be on the wrong track, the agents became frustrated. Strong interviewers become aware of the frustration, recognize its cause, and actively move it aside, focusing on the facts and the situation rather than letting their emotional responses take charge. To do this requires self-awareness and the ability to recognize emotions and recognize why you are experiencing them. Only then can you let them go.
Presence
Similarly, to interview well we have to be present in the interview. We have to be fully engaged with the person in front of us paying attention to what they are saying and making meaningful sense of why they are saying it. In other words, we need to key in on their perspective rather than ours, getting out of our narrative and paying attention to the moment.
But this agent was trapped in tunnel vision, overwhelmed by high cognitive load and unable to process the person in front of him and the information being put to him. In short, he was not present in that interview but stuck somewhere else in his own mind.
Conclusion
The Niblick family lived for three years, not knowing if federal agents would return to arrest them. Recently, when a Wisconsin resident was arrested for the bomb threats, the FBI didn't even notify the family they were cleared. They only learned this when a journalist encouraged them to call the FBI. This should not happen. Nor should that interview have happened as it did.
We can train interviewers in science-based interviewing techniques, where the focus is on obtaining accurate information and intelligence (rather than proving guilt), and wec can run them through scenario after scenario to erase all of the old, counterproductive habits, but changing mindset has to come from the interviewer. It takes time and effort to become self-aware, to develop the confidence that allows you to recognize when you are wrong, and to be okay with that.
And it takes time and effort to develop the metacognitive abilities to be present in an interview and to recognize why you are feeling certain emotions, why these are producing certain reactions, and to let those go so you can return to being in the moment.
Science-based interview training is a necessity but it can only be successful when the interviewer makes the commitment outside the classroom to consistently work on developing an effective interviewer mindset.
