Cops lie to suspects during interrogations. Should detectives stick to the truth?

Thomas Perez Jr. was hours into an interrogation by police about his missing father when they dropped some devastating news: A body had been found. “There is no question in my mind that there are innocent people sitting in prison, based on the approach the law enforcement took,” said retired Los Angeles Police Department Det. That report, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren would later point out, also cautioned that the method “involves also the dangers of false confessions” and “tends to make police and prosecutors less zealous in the search for objective evidence.” But no one could say it didn’t work: In some departments, police were clearing huge numbers of homicides. The interrogation theme reinforces the subject’s rationalizations or justifications for committing the crime,” Reid and Associates explains in a bulletin titled “Common Erroneous and False Statements About the Reid Technique.” The Reid Technique also condones lying in certain circumstances, as long as it doesn’t involve “incontrovertible or dispositive evidence,” noting that the Supreme Court in 1969 in Frazier vs. Cupp ruled that police lying to a suspect did not make an “otherwise voluntary confession inadmissible.” Reid trainings were soon used by police departments across the country. But, “we’ve used this as an opportunity to be better.” And while he called the debate over interrogation methods a “complex question,” he said he remains convinced “that there’s a point in time to use ruses in interrogation techniques.” “I don’t want any contact, ever, with any police officer,” Thomas Perez Jr., left, says of his lost faith in law enforcement.