To the Editor,
In an op-ed piece entitled "The Usual Suspect" that appeared in the Jan. 3, 2002 issue of The Dartmouth, the author, Pedro Csar De Los Santos Lora, said "The Hanover (and the New Hampshire) Police, apart from being inexperienced, were incompetent, ignorant and racist."
Believe it or not, people who commit serious crimes actually lie about, and even deny, involvement (imagine that!). As the author stated, he was a potential suspect in a murder investigation, and while he knew he wasn't involved, the criminal investigators could not know that. I can't speak to the "racist" issue (the author was there; I wasn't) but from his description of the questioning techniques, topics and methods, it sounds to me like the approach used by the law enforcement officers was a textbook example of methods designed as much to eliminate the innocent as to implicate the guilty. But to see that, one has to understand the theory of criminal interrogation.
Much of what the author experienced -- the irrelevant and/or repetitious questions, the unannounced appearance of law enforcement officers, the accusatory language -- were designed purposefully to test the limits of his patience, his propensity for sudden violent outbursts, his comfort or discomfort in the presence of investigators and so on.
The theory of criminal interrogation is far too complex to be addressed in a letter to the editor. For those who are interested, I suggest "Criminal Interrogation and Confession" by Fred E. Inbau, et al. It's one of the most authoritative texts on the subject, written for the lay person as well as the law enforcement professional.
Interrogations are not social events, and the rules of social interaction do not apply. The upside of professional interrogation techniques is that they can be highly effective in establishing guilt or innocence. The downside is that they can really offend the innocent, as the author described so aptly, if the person being interrogated forgets that the police are there to find out whether or not they are talking to a killer.
