In an article published earlier this year, The Problem of Interrogation-Induced False Confession: Sources of Failure in Prevention and Detection, the authors, Dr. Richard Leo and Deborah Davis, continue the trend of misrepresenting the tenets of The Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation.
On page 19 of the article the authors state, "Finally, specific investigations of the effects of training in the "Behavior Analysis Interview" developed and promoted by Inbau, Reid and colleagues in their manuals and training materials and seminars have shown that the training decreases accuracy relative to untrained controls (Kassin & Fong, 1999)."
The facts are exactly the opposite. When trained interviewers evaluated the responses of 80 different subjects in real-life Behavior Analysis Interviews they achieved an accuracy rate of 86% for truthful subjects and 83% for deceptive subjects (see Criminal Interrogations and Confessions, 5th ed, page 102 - NSA study). Furthermore, it has been demonstrated in the last several years that accuracy in detecting deception increases significantly with real-life subjects when the interviewer understands the context in which the interview was conducted, and when the interviewer has been properly trained in the in the field of behavior symptom analysis (Blair 2010 and Hartwig 2006 - details on page 103 in Criminal Interrogation and Confessions).
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