by Charles Humble, Founder, NITV Federal Services
The most common refrain that students mention on their critique forms at the Annual Advanced Examiners/Re Certification Course conducted by the NITV Federal Services is that they realized they had been cutting corners and weren’t getting the results they once had when they first became certified CVSA examiners.
Many years ago one of our examiners from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement called me and said he didn’t know why, but when he first began conducting CVSA exams, he was getting one confession after another, but that lately he was running a lot of tests that were DI but without any confessions. I told him he should sit in on the CEC that was coming up in Orlando. He did, and on Thursday morning he came to me and said that he knew what was wrong – he stopped conducting a thorough DBR®. He called me several weeks later to report that his confession rate was again running about 80% on DI charts.
I have spent most of my adult life perfecting both the CVSA and the Defense Barrier Removal® technique. The results you obtain with the DBR depend solely on the efforts you invest in the subject. As good as the CVSA and DBR are together, they become a much less valuable tool if the DBR is not utilized to its fullest extent. Countless perpetrators have walked out of police stations across the U.S. after taking and failing a CVSA exam because there was little or no evidence against them, and the examiner failed to conduct a good DBR and elicit a confession (you know who you are). Unfortunately, I have done the same thing from time-to-time in the nearly 14,000 exams that I have conducted in my career. Occasionally we all rush an exam that we either don’t deem important or one where we have been ‘informed’ by the investigating officer that the individual being tested is not a suspect. I have conducted many examinations where this was the case, and all too often I found out that I had the perpetrator in front of me after DI charts, when it is too late to go back and do a good DBR.
The problem with some examiners is that ‘occasionally’ turns into a bad habit and they end up simply calling charts with few or no confessions. If you are going to take the time to conduct a CVSA exam, take the time to do it right. You have an obligation to the victim, your department, yourself and the profession to always give every exam your best effort.
Remember how good it felt to get that first confession utilizing the CVSA? If you are one of those that has either minimized or eliminated the DBR without realizing it, now is the time to review your CVSA Operator’s Manual, refresh yourself on DBR, and once again feel the satisfaction of taking a bad guy off the street without leaving your office. The victim will thank you, and you will have the satisfaction of a job very well done.
Although we don’t have the space to print the entire chapter on DBR, it is vitally important that each examiner occasionally reviews the DBR procedure found in your CVSA Operator’s Manual and conducts a good DBR for each and every exam.
Charles Humble is the Founder of NITV Federal Services and the developer of the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. He has conducted over 14,000 examinations during his career and from those examinations, developed the Certified Examiners Course as well as the technique of Defense Barrier Removal (DBR).