Why Are K-12 School Leaders Being Trained In Coercive Interrogation Techniques?

Coercive interrogation techniques are being taught to school administrators to extract confessions from students for "purported crimes." The interrogation style is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, an international interrogation training company that works with police departments, armed services divisions, and security firms around the United States.

The New Yorker reported that the firm taught its patented "Reid Technique" to hundreds of school administrators in eight U.S. states. Reid is using the minimization and maximization interrogation methods, which are said to be effective for obtaining confessions.

The 'Reid Technique'

Minimization downplays the crime and offers possible excuses for it. Maximization is more intense and presents incriminating evidence, and refuses to accept any response except a confession, Bloomberg reported.

Much like the adult version, the school version of the technique has three essential parts: "an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed" to extract an admission of guilt, as indicated in Reid's workbook.

False Confessions

Children and adolescents are usually susceptible toward authority figures. Being easy to intimidate and pressure, they opt for immediate rewards instead of future penalties. As proof of this, the Innocent Project emphasized figures from the National Registry of Exonerations.

It stated that for the last 25 years, acquitted crimes for individuals under 18 years old that included false confessions comprise 38 percent. This is compared to a figure of 11 percent for adults.

A research of exonerations between 1989 and 2004 from the University of Virginia found that "42 percent of the cases of juvenile exonerees involved false confessions, compared with 13 percent of the cases of adult exonerees." Those considered as juvenile exonerees are aged between 12 to 15 years old, with 69 percent of them owning up to homicides and rapes that they didn't commit.

Behavioral Cues

Reid's instruction, on "Criminal Interrogation And Confessions," also included telltale body language that indicates if a suspect is lying. Bloomberg's report, however, stressed that these so-called indicators aren't always accurate.

"Behavioral cues that are discernible by human perceivers are associated with deceit only probabilistically. To establish definitively that someone is lying, further evidence is needed," a 2003 study from the University of Virginia and Missouri-Columbia stated.

Transforming school administrators to interrogators has repercussions as well. The New Yorker reported that these administrators are likely to see every student as potential criminals, tending to believe that "adolescents were just as capable as adults of withstanding psychologically coercive questioning, including deceit."

Less Extreme Actions

In 2014, the Obama administration has proposed schools to ditch zero-tolerance policies and to consider less harsh actions, PBS reported. The government advises schools to practice distinctions between disciplinary infractions and major threats to school safety.