Leading Police Consulting Group Will No Longer Teach the Reid Technique
03.08.17 By Innocence Staff
On Monday, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, one of the biggest consulting groups responsible for training law enforcement officers throughout the country, announced that it would no longer use the Reid Technique, the leading interrogation method used by law enforcement throughout the country.
Since it was introduced around 70 years ago, the Reid Technique has led to countless confessions. Alarmingly, as wrongful conviction cases in the past 25 years have shown, not all of those confessions were legitimate. Thirty percent of the people exonerated by DNA in the United States falsely confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. The total number of people who’ve confessed to crimes they did not commit is unknown.
In light of these exoneration cases, in recent years, criminal justice experts have closely examined the Reid Technique and found that its tactics rely overly on deception, coercion and aggressive confrontation to secure confessions. On Monday, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates expressed that the technique poses far too great a risk to continue to use as a training tool.
“Confrontation is not an effective way of getting truthful information,” said Shane Sturman, CEO of Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates to the Marshall Project. “This was a big move for us, but it’s a decision that’s been coming for quite some time. More and more of our law enforcement clients have asked us to remove it from their training based on all the academic research showing other interrogation styles to be much less risky.”
False confessions expert Saul Kassin said to the Marshall Project, “What Wicklander-Zulawski has realized is that once you start down the road of using trickery and deception, the misuses are inherent in that. There are no clear lines of, ‘This is a good amount of trickery, and this isn’t.’ ”
Read the Marshall Project’s entire story here.
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May 3, 2017 at 9:52 pm
March 13, 2017 at 2:02 pm
i don’t really see too many issues with the reid technique though many used it for deception and some tactics such as exhausting the suspect with hours of questions. The reid technique in my opinion has its uses when used correctly i don’t believe we should use it to make someone falsely plead guilty. what i’m saying is that the issue does not rely on the reid technique solely and you probably know this, but its the people who use the technique the officers in charge of questioning someone that use the technique in an unjustified manner. what you really should do is refine how the technique is used change how you teach it because it has led to rightful convictions and has put the right people in jail what i believe should happen is when the technique is used on the field in order for the reid technique to be credible there should be a greater amount of evidence required in order to use the reid technique to support a conviction and that questioning should not be so rushed but have time limits put on questioning sessions in total to also be agreeable to officers as time is off the essence in cases like murder trials. In simpler terms lower the stress level, adjust time spent and duration spent on a questioning session, and increase the amount of evidence needed.
I agree with the non-confrontational approach. I wonder how long and what factors, other than the false confessions, influenced your decision?