Make-Believe Class for Real-Life World : Police Detectives Hone Interrogation Skills, With UCLA Student Actors in Major Roles

David Dionisio was in trouble and he knew it. He fidgeted, squirmed and tapped his feet, rolled his eyes and and swiveled his head to avoid looking at the dignified, bespectacled man across the table.

But his interrogator, Los Angeles Police Detective William Michael, was sure Dionisio had raped a Hollywood woman, and the detective poked and prodded, bartering a little evidence here, offering a little phony empathy there, working a little con job when he had to, angling for the prize of the day: a confession.

Dionisio said he didn’t mind talking, but he remained surly. Over and over, he denied he had done anything. Again and again, Michael thrust and parried.

Suggested Line

Solicitously, the detective kept suggesting that perhaps the woman had lured Dionisio, and gradually Dionisio adopted that line, but admitted no blame. Finally, a half-hour into the interview, Michael casually informed his suspect that his fingerprints had been found in the woman’s bedroom--a lie. Dionisio gave in, and he agreed to write out a confession.

That done, the two stood up, smiled and shook hands, and Dionisio began critiquing the detective’s approach.

“You should have asked me more questions” about an early alibi, said the young man--not a rapist, but a UCLA graduate student in drama. “You could have turned my words against me.”

The role-playing session was part of a day of on-the-job training for Michael and two dozen other Los Angeles Police Department detectives who had been drafted to participate in a new instructional program designed to strengthen their ability to interrogate criminal suspects.

The detectives spent Friday locked in a series of one-on-one verbal confrontations with Dionisio and 13 other acting students, testing whether the good guys could persuade the bad guys to come clean.

Both sides had prepared themselves. The man who developed the program, Lt. Vance Proctor, a veteran detective supervisor, had drilled the detectives for two days on how to coax, bait and sweet-talk information out of suspects and how to read the body language of deceit.

Refine Fine Arts of Lying

Proctor had also taught many of the same maneuvers to the UCLA actors, helping them refine the fine arts of lying, stalling and spreading bull.

Even veterans need these sort of workouts, Proctor believes, because, in contrast to their television image, many detectives haven’t polished the skill of persuading suspects, witnesses and victims to talk to them.

“Unconsciously, a lot of detectives give people the message ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ ” he said.

“Most of the detective’s job, 90% of it, is talking to people. You’d assume that is where most of the emphasis in our training would be given, but in surveying departments across the country, it’s not.”

A detective usually enters a case after a suspect has been arrested and works to build a case strong enough to convince the district attorney that charges should be filed.

However, too often, Proctor and others say, a detective will not try hard enough to persuade a suspect to confess. Instead, he will presume that a suspect is not willing to talk, or he will give up too soon. The case will be sent to prosecutors based upon physical evidence and witnesses’ statements.

“Not talking to the suspect in custody is one of the biggest problems in filing,” said Steve Kay, who heads the central complaints division for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Kay said he notices that particular omission more in cases submitted by Los Angeles police than by smaller departments or the Sheriff’s Department. “If we don’t talk to the suspect by the time of filing, the suspect will get an attorney and we’ll never talk to them.”

Conviction Rates

Lt. Myron Wasson, in charge of the Police Department’s detective training, said that if extra time can be spent trying to induce a suspect to talk, “your filing rate (how often the D.A.’s office files charges against arrested suspects) is going to go up and your conviction rate is going to go up.”

Proctor said he became interested in the little-discussed and often instinctive process of police interrogation when he was supervising detectives in the department’s Hollywood Division.

“I would listen in on interviews. People would make a classical statement like, ‘What’s gonna happen to me if I tell you I did it?’ and the detective would reply, ‘Well, you’ll go to jail, what do you think will happen?’ and the guy wouldn’t say any more.”

In contrast, during Friday’s role-playing, when actor Dionisio was wavering toward confessing and asked Detective Michael, “OK, man, if I cop to this, what’s gonna happen?” Michael was appropriately evasive.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” he said.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” Dionisio responded vigorously.

“I’m going to take your statement and then I’m going to take her (the victim’s) statement and take them to the district attorney,” Michael said even-handedly, adding a soft prod after a pause: “You don’t need this grief, man.”

Actor Relents

The actor, having been coached by Proctor to give in once the detective had pursued a prolonged and proper course of persuasion, then began to describe the rape.

Proctor contends that an appreciation of conversational subtleties, clever tricks and non-verbal communication can lead a suspect to waive his constitutional rights (which hold that he has no obligation to talk to police after his arrest) and then maneuver him into a confession.

Critical to such a skill, he told the detectives, is the ability to identify phrases, gestures and attitudes that generally mark a suspect who is trying to lie. Refusal to establish eye contact, a withdrawing body posture and persistent mannerisms like sighs, yawns and playing with paper and other objects are hallmarks, Proctor said.

Once a detective can recognize this pattern, he can exploit it, boring in on the suspect, often leading him into an easily punctured alibi, he said.

“I have learned so much from this course,” said Detective Mike Casados, a four-year detective. “I just didn’t know there were so many different techniques” to elicit information.

Purposeful Pressure

Proctor designed the workshop to be pressure-filled. Detectives’ performances were watched by peers, videotaped by UCLA television production students and critiqued immediately by supervisors.

There were some obvious flaws. Casados, for example, spent 15 minutes questioning a teen-age robbery suspect before he remembered to advise her of her constitutional right to an attorney. That invalidated any information she had previously provided.

Both Proctor and Wasson said many detectives seem to have grown less inventive and persistent about talking to suspects in past decades because of changes in the law.

One factor is a series of court rulings in the last 20 years requiring police to carefully advise a suspect of his right to remain silent.

“I think a lot of detectives got frustrated because they’d try to do what was right in some situations only to find the rules changing next month, and after a while this attitude developed: ‘Let’s make our case on what we have and not even bother talking to the guy,’ ” Proctor said.

As far as UCLA’s student actors were concerned, Proctor’s interviewing school was a chance to work on their improvisational skills and gain insight into criminals.

Stored Experience

“It’s an opportunity for them to experience a crisis situation and store away the information their body is giving to them,” said Norman Welsh, vice chairman of the theater division of UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film and Television. The university donated the work of 40 actors and technicians.

Detectives gave the acting students high marks for the intensity they brought into the interview rooms.

“I’ve role-played with them and my palm left a big sweaty spot on the table,” Proctor said. “I had to ask a couple if they’d been arrested before.”