Steve Gambini reports for the Waterbury, Connecticut Republican-American. Excerpt:
WATERBURY — Employees with access to the fourth floor of City Hall will be asked to take polygraph tests as police continue to investigate possible causes of a massive weekend flood in the building.
“We’re going to ask them to take a polygraph because it’s a valuable tool,” said Police Chief Neil O’Leary. “It’s a very routine investigative tool that’s used by our department. It’s so routine that we have three certified polygraph examiners in the department.”
Firefighters who were working on the day of the incident were among the first to be asked to take the lie detector tests, but O’Leary said the investigation is not trying to single out those workers above all other potential suspects.
“We’re starting with the people who had immediate access, and that would include the people who were sleeping in the building,” O’Leary said. “Then we’ll move on to other city employees, and quite frankly some former employees who had access to the building.”
Those current employees will include those who were using the closed, fourth-floor office as a place to smoke cigarettes during the workday. O’Leary said investigators found numerous ash trays in the small office.
Daniel French, president of the firefighters union, said he was consulting with the bargaining unit’s attorneys for advice on how the firefighters should respond to the request for lie detector tests.
“They haven’t even ruled out the possibility that it was an accident or a frozen pipe yet,” French added.
If Waterbury, Connecticut firefighters and other city hall employees can be legally compelled to submit to polygraph interrogations, then it might be prudent for all to educate themselves about the trickery on which polygraph “testing” depends and then adopt the “complete honesty” approach outlined in Chapter 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, informing their polygraphers up-front that they understand that polygraphy is a pseudoscientific sham.