Chatting (NON-GPT style)

The percentage of audiences who recognize the name Joe Friday is dwindling faster than my eyesight.

Sgt. Joe Friday was the no-nonsense LAPD detective from the show Dragnet, one of the most popular police shows of all time. Friday was famous for conducting interviews of witnesses, and when they rambled too much, interrupting with “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

Interviewing is an indispensable police skill. There is no one rubber stamp formula for conducting a successful interview of a suspect or a witness. As such, interviewing is very much an art form, and the investigator conducting the interview needs to tailor the conversation to the individual’s personality type, age, gender, race, and a host of other variables. Interviewing people was our bread and butter in Homicide, so it has always had a special place in my heart. In trying to make us highly skilled interviewers, the department sent us to interview/interrogation seminars and training schools. They were all very good, but I always found two things were going to make you a better interviewer: a) watching the best interviewers work, and b) getting in the interview room yourself and doing it as much as you can.

The importance of this aspect of police work cannot be overstated, especially since good interviewing skills are getting harder and harder to find. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that the future of the police interview is in danger. Hear me out.

Today’s teenagers don’t read or write as well as they did just twelve years ago. I don’t have all the data, but I taught high school from 2010 to 2013, took an eight-year break, and came back to teaching last year. I had one freshman class in 2022, but now my classes are all juniors and seniors. From that eight-year break, I see a startling difference in their communication skills. My observations are not off base. Writing scores for high school students around the country are down.

From time to time, I call on students read aloud from our text books. Some of these kids have a tough time reading simple sentences. When my assignments have called for them to write, their struggles are even more profound. Many of the papers I get are rife with grammar and punctuation errors, missing even simple capitalization rules. In class discussions, I see too many kids having difficulty expressing themselves verbally. I fear this has been going on for a couple of generations. Consider this: today’s kids will have less examples of good communication to pass on to their kids.

Folks, today’s teenagers are tomorrow’s cops. To believe that they will be skillful interviewers is pure fantasy.

Not the cheeriest prediction ever, I know, but it's not all gloom and doom. In a recent issue of Police and Security News magazine, my article celebrated the kids in my Mock Trial team. I talked about how well they communicated, and I stand by that. But they are the outliers in today’s schools. The gap between them and the rest of the student populace is wide, and the ones in the lower rungs are barely cutting it when it comes to literacy and verbal skills.

Besides interview room scenarios aside, police officers need to communicate effectively on routine dispatched calls, many of which have some sort of dispute or conflict that needs to be managed, if not resolved. If our law enforcement ranks get worse at discourse, verbal problem-solving, and writing reports, then these routine calls—domestic fights, etc—will result in an increasing number of negative events, including injuries to civilians and officers. I don’t believe I’m overthinking this. Police work has already experienced a decade or more of volatile incidents and seemingly endless bad propaganda on social media (much of it justified).

When I teach my Interview Techniques class to regional law enforcement audiences (if you’re interested, contact Training Force, USA), I contrast the outdated witness interview methods with today’s “cognitive” interview strategies. In cognitive interviews, the focus is on the witness; their comfort level, establishing a welcoming, non-stressful environment that helps them in the process of recall. Rather than chop the interview into questions that restrict the witness to certain answers, we are supposed to encourage them to tell the story of their experience, before and after the incident. A good example might be if I asked you where you went on your last road trip, and you said, “We drove from Miami to Atlanta.” You might tell me how long it took (if I asked), but not much else. In a cognitive conversation, I want to you tell me where you stopped for gas or to buy boiled peanuts, and how the weather might have changed during the trip. Maybe the guy who sold the boiled peanuts on the side of the road was weird or interesting, and you had a conversation with him. What was that like?

I’m sorry, Sgt. Joe Friday, but “just the facts, Ma’am,” is not what we are looking for. We want the witness to ramble a bit, to tell us details that might not be terribly important, but that will assist the witness in filling in the details of the picture, the way Bob Ross shows us how he puts blossoms on a small patch of trees near a river. Those details help sustain and bolster something neurologists call “pattern completion.” If a witness can’t remember exactly when she heard the gunshots, maybe we need to find out what time she got up, when she started watching her favorite soap, and when she vacuumed the living room. Those events, pieced together, might just allow for that missing piece to drop in, and pinpoint the activity she was involved in when she heard the shots. These things, the experts say, complete the patterns our brains need to sharpen recall.

My fear is that it is going to be tougher and tougher for present and future generations to conduct sound, effective, productive interviews, whether it is at someone’s door or in an interview room. I fear this because my perception is that the overall communication skills they will need in the future aren’t being used or cultivated now. My perceptions might be completely off kilter, and I welcome feedback from any of you who would like to tell me that I’ve lost my mind (my wife would welcome the company).

And if these concerns we have for the state of education in our country weren’t enough, we have AI entering the scene. Maybe we won’t have to worry about all the things I just wrote about. Maybe a highly adept AI program will conduct the interview for us. If that day comes and I am in my grave, don’t knock on my casket, because I would rather truly rest in peace than know what we’ve become.