WHY OUR TRAINING:
There are three essential core components to an interview training program. One component is to create the foundation for interviewing and obtaining the information that is being sought. The second is to be able to actually evaluate what is being said, along with identifying valid behavioral interview cues, to assess truth or deception. Over the last 50 years, most interview training has taught the wrong cues, such as nervousness or eye contact for detecting deception. Our training is well supported by psychology research. Third, we choose to teach behavioral intervention for eliciting information from resisitnat subjects, accepted in psychology and cognitive behavioral therapies.
If you want to be able to defend your interview training you need what the research and literature supports. We offer expert testimony to defend officers who are correctly employing our training. The Validated Interview Technique was designed from from the ground up to be evidence based and what works in the field.
01 - Basic Interviewing Course: $125/per student
This is a one day course for the beginning investigator who desires to develop foundation skills. Instruction covers interview planning, personality assessment, use of proper question types and some basic differences between truthful and deceptive subjects. This course can be adapted for patrol interdiction officers. We show how to avoid using unsupported behavior cues, such as gaze aversion and nervous behavior. Our training will reduce "false positive" errors (wrongly accusing the truthful person), and increasing an understanding of confirmation bias.
Interviewing Witnesses and Victims - Critical Incident Management
This is a one day course designed to help officers interview people at the scene of a critical incident, or who are victims of traumatic events. The vast majority of officers have attended Active Shooter training. Have your officers attended a research proven course on interviewing witnesses in the aftermath of a shooting? The course will also include methodology for gathering and assessing information with a number of interviewers. Give us a call to set up a local course.
02 - Behavioral Interview and Intervention Course: $595/per student
This an advanced three to four day course that teaches our Validated Interview Technique. This course will include interview planning, our simple field personality assessment, and the correct evaluation of content, vocal and visual behavior cues. We teach a narrative interview style that seeks sensory & memory details in order to increase mental effort for the guilty and lower stress for the truthful. Our L.E.E.N. method for conversation management will result in increased information flow from subjects who seem unwilling to tell the truth. We address the issue of "False Confessions" and teach behavioral intervention as a transformational technique rather than older transactional interview styles that can result in accusations of false confession. Our interactive student training tools to help improve competency in use of the information we teach from real criminal interviews.
03 - Enhanced Validated Interview Course: $895 per student *
This is our premier five day course for advanced interview training. We have incorporated the use of a “2-in-1” hybrid laptop to record interview notes during our advanced training. Hybrids utilize a “digitizer” pen, that functions like traditional pen and paper for the interviewer. However, hybrids can support simultaneous applications, such as audio / video recording & the collection of physiology from the subject, using Microsoft off the shelf products.
We have developed groundbreaking software that "docks" the real time collection of electro-dermal activity (EDA) during the interview into the written field notes. This unique capability shows subject arousal and guides the asking of detail oriented questions during the actual interview. The EDA has been studied for more than 100 years in detecting arousal to a stimulus and is very easily interpreted. As early as 1897, scientist Harold Sticker noted “the galvanic skin phenomenon is under the influence of exciting mental impressions and the will has no effect on it”.
04 - Train the Trainer Course in Validated Interview Technique: $895/per student **
This is a 40 hour course that will teach your investigator to provide in-house instruction on our Validated Interview Technique plus basic instructor competency principles. We license our copyrighted training to the student for your agency use on a subscription basis, and provide our training software applications for your agency trainer's use. We have an E-Learning website for access to all of our training material and behavioral psychology research that supports the training principles we teach. (Significant and strict requirements for attendance for this course.)
Train the Trainer Requirements:
Applicant must be a member of a government or law enforcement agency with verifiable investigations and interview experience. Applicant should be capable of instructing material in front of others. Non-profit use by government agency only. Strict use of unaltered training materials only. Submission of student critiques for all courses taught.