Public Servant,
I believe this is my sixth (and final) in a series of responses to you regarding your last post to me. I hope in addition to any comments you might care to offer, that you will answer my various questions contained throughout these posts. If it should be necessary or even helpful, I would be glad to extract and list those questions for you.
You write:
Quote:…How does a person with a chemistry background end up in the polygraph field?…Why did the FBI hire you as a scientist, but place you in the field as a special agent first?…What type of work did you do with the bureau before going into the lab and poly?…
In my case, I arrived at that juncture (polygraph research) having taken several professional twists and turns following the time I received an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Having worked for approximately 3 years as an organic chemist for a pharmaceutical company I was recruited by the FBI in connection with its “science program”-hiring category for Special Agents. At that time (and as far as I know this is still the case) all agents, including those who were hired with various future specialty assignments in mind, e.g. attorneys who would eventually be in the Office of General Counsel, accountants who might be in the Finance Division, and scientists in the FBI Laboratory, etc., served at least one initial field investigative assignment following new agent training at the FBI Academy in Quantico. The notion, which I believe to be well founded and which dated back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, was that one who would ultimately serve as a specialist would be more productive in that role if he/she had some prior field experience with the overall general product (law enforcement) of the parent organization. In my case, I served an initial assignment in the Bureau’s Field Office in Chicago and was involved in general criminal work, organized crime investigations, and a brief assignment involving foreign counterintelligence matters.
Following that assignment I was assigned to the Laboratory Division and served as an examiner in the Chemistry Toxicology Unit. A few years later I was requested by the Bureau’s Polygraph Unit on several occasions to conduct various toxicological examinations directed towards determining whether an examinee had used drugs in an effort to manipulate the results of a polygraph examination. In subsequent years, along with having maintained various personal contacts within the Polygraph Unit, and at a time I was involved in two doctoral programs (completed the coursework requirements for a Ph.D. degree in pharmacology and later the overall degree requirements for a Ph.D. degree in physiology), my research interests eventually led me to become involved in the Laboratory’s polygraph research program at Quantico.
Your further write:
Quote:I have seen persons…question the validity of the exam because they are not successful at validating their results with admissions/confessions…
This is probably a good point for me to both end these series of posts and to reinforce the absolute need for a scientific background if one is to engage in procedures that purport to involve meaningful diagnosis. Although a confession by a guilty subject following a deceptive polygraph exam may anecdotally be quite useful to a case agent, the criminal justice system, and society in general, it has absolutely nothing to do with determining overall validity of a diagnostic procedure, e.g., polygraphy. Validity is not a function of and is not determined via good interviews, interrogations, or criminal investigations (although all of these things serve vital functions) but is soundly grounded and defined by principles of science. The problem with tying notions of validity to confessions is largely twofold: (1) Even a confession following a true positive polygraph exam is at best anecdotal and not suggestive of overall accuracy and validity, and as we know from various high profile recent (e.g., Daniel King) and other ongoing matters (e.g., Higazy?) that not all confessions are necessarily associated with guilt (The examiners involved, no doubt, believed the confessions obtained validated their respective tests, right?), and (2) More importantly, in the absence of a confession, a polygraph examiner with deceptive charts will most frequently not know (and certainly not know based on the “reading” of his charts) whether a guilty examinee has not “fessed up” or whether he is dealing with a false positive exam result and a subsequently falsely accused but completely innocent examinee. It is precisely this phenomenon (and trying to associate validity with confessions) that will of necessity lead polygraph examiners to underestimate the number of errors (false positives) that they make during any given time period.
Again, I believe there is no more appropriate way for me to close than with this subject and with what I believe to be a very clear example of why a science background and a statistical approach to evaluating evidence is not only desirable but essential if one is to be involved in assessing validity and other parameters of a diagnostic procedure. As always, best regards, and I will look forward to your various comments and answers to my questions,
Drew Richardson