The junk science cops use to decide you’re lying

THE TRAINING SESSION was billed as “cutting edge,” and dozens of law enforcement professionals signed up to learn about “New Tools for Detecting Deception” from a human lie detector who calls herself “Eyes for Lies.” Her real name is Renee Ellory, and she claims that she’s one of just 50 people identified by scientists as having the ability to spot deception “with exceptional accuracy.”

A flyer for the event, hosted by Wisconsin’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area — a federal program that supports law enforcement drug interdiction work — was included among a trove of law enforcement documents that were hacked and posted online in June under the title BlueLeaks. The promo copy leans heavily into Ellory’s skill at ferreting out deception in others. She is “exceptional at pinpointing a liar and can tell you why she doesn’t trust someone on the spot,” it reads. Training participants would learn how to “identify anger, contempt, and disgust before words are even spoken.” Course objectives were broad: Learn to differentiate between “real” and “fake emotional displays”; “recognize hidden emotions”; identify the “ways our subconscious brain leaks information when we lie”; “analyze body language that indicates deception”; gain tips to use when interviewing a psychopath; “identify the key features of expressions that reveal danger for you!”

Participants spanned the law enforcement spectrum and included the chief of a small police department, corrections officers, university cops, state troopers, various members of the Milwaukee Police Department as well as individuals from the U.S. Probation Office and the FBI. In surveys filled out after the training, which took place in November 2015, the common complaint was that there weren’t enough structured breaks; as one participant put it, “the mind can only absorb what the buttocks can tolerate.” But otherwise, a majority of the 82 respondents gave the training high marks. Participants wrote that they would incorporate what they’d learned into their police work. A number of them said the most valuable thing they learned was “the seven universal facial expressions that all people have all over the world as a good indicator” of lying, as one trainee put it.

It might seem reassuring that so many law enforcement officers found a skills training so valuable. But not in this case. That’s because Ellory’s lie detection training is based what many psychologists say are largely discredited theories, if not simply junk science. “It’s completely bogus,” said Jeff Kukucka, an assistant professor of psychology and law at Towson University who studies forensic confirmation bias, interrogations, and false confessions. “And what’s maybe more alarming about it … is that this isn’t new. We’ve known for quite a while that this stuff doesn’t work, but it’s still being peddled as if it does.”

The BlueLeaks documents contain numerous flyers for trainings offered to police agencies across the country. Many of them promote methods of interviewing and interrogation, lie detection, and detecting “danger,” such as Ellory’s, that rest on unsteady scientific ground and have been linked to false confessions and wrongful convictions. The documents offer a window into how various training methods perpetuate myths — subjective, hunch-based approaches to interpreting human behavior that are unreliable and have been discredited by leading psychologists — that police are then encouraged to use in crime solving.

The search for a foolproof method of lie detection has a “long history,” said Richard Leo, a professor of law and psychology at the University of San Francisco School of Law and an expert on interrogation practices. “The search for some way to be able to read body language, demeanor, vocal pitch, gestures and then infer with a high degree of accuracy whether someone is telling the truth.” It just doesn’t exist, he said. He likens many of the claims about human lie detection to claims of psychic ability. “This reminds me of psychics and the lottery. If there was a psychic and they could see what the lottery numbers are, that would just be gold, right? Why wouldn’t they win $400 million when the Powerball is up there?”

As the country has become increasingly focused on police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis cops, experts say the movement should include reforms to the way police are trained to interview and interrogate suspects, witnesses, and victims to ensure they’re grounded in best practices supported by science. “Part of the distrust that you see between law enforcement and minority communities stems from the way that suspects, witnesses, victims, and family members are treated by detectives during the course of an investigation,” said Steven Drizin, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, who studies false confessions. Law enforcement training that isn’t based in science “just furthers the deterioration of the relationship between case officers and people in the community.”

In addition to Wisconsin’s HIDTA, police agencies in California, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas have promoted Ellory’s trainings, according to flyers found within the BlueLeaks files. One flyer boasts that Ellory has trained law enforcement in the “largest U.S. cities,” including “New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno, Key West — just to name a few.” In an email to The Intercept, Ellory said she has been training as Eyes for Lies since 2009 and estimates she’s reached between 2,500 and 3,000 law enforcement officers.

The problem is that what she’s teaching them has been widely discredited — an assertion Ellory vehemently denies. According to Ellory, she was one of 50 individuals identified as an “expert in deception” as part of the so-called Wizards Project, run by researchers associated with Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. The researchers studied thousands of people — from CIA and Secret Service agents to regular folks — to see who could best detect behavior associated with deception, a practice that relies heavily on the idea of universal facial expressions and so-called microexpressions that last mere fractions of a second. Ellory’s trainings rely on the validity of both concepts.

While the theory of universal expressions dates back to Charles Darwin, research has been mixed, and Ekman’s work in this area has been repeatedly challenged by scientists in recent years as unreliable, in part because of methodological issues.

Where microexpressions are concerned — also an area of Ekman’s studies — subsequent research has found them “rare and nondiagnostic,” Kukucka said, and that training individuals to see them doesn’t actually work.

Ultimately, Kukucka said, the individuals Ekman identified as exceptional human lie detectors were simply a result of chance. With the Wizards Project, the idea was to test thousands of people to identify those who scored “unusually” high on a lie detection test, Kukucka said. Out of 15,000 people, “they found 50 who were unusually good. And they thought maybe from those people’s knowledge they could reverse engineer — OK, well, what are these people doing that’s working? And then use that to figure out what actually works,” he explained. “The problem with that is, it’s a total artifact of just having a bunch of people and how probability works. If you flip 15,000 coins 10 times, you’re going to get a couple that come up heads all 10 times, but there’s really nothing different about those coins than any of the other coins, just dumb luck.”

Indeed, years of research has demonstrated that behavioral cues — like eye-blinking, arm-crossing, a voice rising or dropping in pitch — are simply not reliable indicators of deception. “A lot of ‘police science’ is really pseudoscience,” Drizin said. “Police officers do believe that they’re able to detect liars from truth-tellers at much higher rates that you and I are. And that’s just been proven not to be the case.” In fact, research has found that the odds of a person detecting deception in another are really no better than chance, and that while those who’ve been trained to do so feel more confident in their conclusions, they’re no more competent. “When police are trained in this false and misleading stuff, they become more confident, so they become more prone to error,” said Leo. “It’s just this loop, this dangerous loop.”

In an email exchange, Ellory first wrote that she wouldn’t have time to explain things to me unless I took one of her courses — her “master class” is currently priced at $1,950 per person — but then noted that she’s not “actively doing” classes right now.

In a subsequent email, she defended her trainings as being rooted in science but wrote that as a “rare expert,” she’s used to people not understanding that. “I find at times with my gift, it’s akin to seeing color in a world where other people live in a colorblind world. Seeing color is ‘real’ but trying to convince a color blind person color exists is nearly impossible,” she wrote. “I tell people in my classes what I teach will be common knowledge in 100 years, but we are still in the dark ages when it comes to understanding human behavior and deception,” she continued. “At a point, I learned, I can’t change the world alone. But I can educate those who are open to learning and they have thanked me endlessly.”

When asked whether it is appropriate to be training law enforcement officers who have power over individual liberty to use scientifically unproven techniques, Ellory retorted that she was “scientifically validated” by Ekman’s research. “I don’t need to reprove it to anyone.”

“You are saying that I shouldn’t teach because I can’t make people like me? Does that mean that Nobel prize winners, acclaimed scientists and researchers who achieve great things shouldn’t teach other people because other people may not reach the same success?” she asked. “Like Lance Armstrong should never coach because he could sustain a heart of 32 beats per minute and consume freakishly low oxygen, but others can’t — so it’s useless?”

“I don’t get that reasoning on any level,” she wrote. “I have insight into human behavior that most people have never considered, don’t understand and when I share it with them through demonstration and example it changes their world for the better. I don’t teach interrogation techniques. I teach people how to seek and find the truth.”

Kukucka called Ellory’s response bizarre. “They’re selling snake oil. I mean, let’s be honest,” he said. “They’re raking in money by selling snake oil to, unfortunately, people who have a lot of clout.”

More HERE 






‘Christianity Will Have Power’: How a Promise by Trump Bonded Him to White Evangelicals

In the excerpt below, the NYT offers an explanation of why evangelicals support Trump.  I think it is pretty right

SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — They walked to the sanctuary in the frozen silence before dawn, footsteps crunching over the snow. Soon, hundreds joined in line. It was January 2016, and the unlikely Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, had come to town.

Many were skeptical, and came to witness the spectacle for themselves. A handful stood in silent protest. But when the doors opened and the pews filled, Mr. Trump’s fans welcomed him by chanting his name. A man waved a “Silent Majority Stands With Trump” sign. A woman pointed a lone pink fingernail up to the sky.

In his dark suit and red tie, Mr. Trump stood in front of a three-story-tall pipe organ and waved his arms in time with their shouts: Trump, Trump, Trump.

The 67-minute speech Mr. Trump gave that day at Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, would become infamous, instantly covered on cable news and to this day still invoked by his critics.

But the line that gained notoriety — the promise that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and “wouldn’t lose any voters” — overshadowed another message that morning. “I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Trump said.

Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have.”

If he were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger. “Christianity will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

When November came, they stood by him en masse: 81 percent of the county voted for him. And so did 81 percent of white evangelical voters nationwide.

Now, this group could be Mr. Trump’s best chance at re-election. The president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has battered his political standing: He has trailed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, by nearly double digits for a month in national polls. Even among white evangelicals, his approval rating has dipped slightly. But 82 percent say they intend to vote for him, according to the Pew Research Center.

Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.

“You are always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten, who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right there.”

Ultimately Mr. Trump recognized something, said Lisa Burg, a longtime resident of nearby Orange City. It is a reason she thinks people will still support him in November.

“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”

SOURCE 






For Journalists, History Started Yesterday

It always amazes me just how stupid reporters are. Maybe stupid isn’t the right word, ignorant is more like it. How do people who claim to be the arbiters of what is news not follow the news? Seems like knowing what you’re talking about would be an important component of journalism, especially since journalism considers itself “the first draft of history.” But for too many of these left-wing teleprompter readers and Democratic Party stenographers, history just started yesterday.

MSNBC anchor Katy Tur is known not for her depth of knowledge on important issues, but her basic ignorance of things that happened in her lifetime is disturbing. In a debate in 2017 with a Republican congressman (because why wouldn’t a “news” anchor debate a Republican?), she exposed how unaware she was of something that happened in 2012 – when then-President Barack Obama told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to tell Vladimir Putin he’d have “more flexibility” after the election. It was news to Tur, whose excuse was, “To be fair, I didn't touch politics in 2012. I almost exclusively covered fires and shootings in NYC area.” Apparently New York City doesn’t have cable news or newspapers.

But all the ignorance of things that happened before today isn’t limited to television personalities. Colby Itkowitz, who covers national politics for the Washington Post, showed just how oblivious a reporter could be and still hold a job. Saturday, after President Trump signed executive orders related to tax policy and coronavirus relief, Colby tweeted, “Let's ponder the most played out question of the last four years, but can you imagine if Obama had broken up a congressional stalemate over funding by simply signing an executive order and saying it was so? (jinx @pbump).”

This is particularly stupid for a number of reasons. First, in tagging her co-worker Phillip Bump, she showed she was quite proud of beating him to this declaration, that this sort of talk is common around the Post. Second, President Obama changed large sections of Obamacare with the stroke of his magic pen well within her lifetime. Third, if history didn’t start until Trump was elected, you’d at least think a reporter covering national politics for a major newspaper would be aware of the legal challenges to the DACA program, especially since the Supreme Court just ruled on it in June.

All of these escaped Itkowitz’s notice, somehow. When her ignorance was made apparent to her, she did what all good “journalists” would do – deleted the tweet and pretended it never happened.

Lest you think it’s just the younger media types who are ignorant of history, the senior citizen-set appears to have a memory rivaling Joe Biden’s as well.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column titled “No Wrist Corsages, Please,” Saturday about how it’s been since 1984 that Democrats had a man and a woman on their presidential ticket. “It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket, writes @MaureenDowd,” the Times tweeted about a column Down had written proclaiming the same.

I understand why liberals would want to forget the 2016 election, and why everyone would like to forget Hillary Clinton, but you’d think someone in the multi-person editorial process that takes place before anything gets published by the Times would have a memory of it. (Not to mention ignoring the 2008 Republican “mixed-gender ticket.) You’d be wrong. The correction, “An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the history of the Democratic ticket. It has been 36 years since a man chose a woman to run as his vice-president on the Democratic ticket, not 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket,” is one for the record books.

These are but three examples of ignorance of recent history from people working in a profession noted for the smugness of its practitioners.

Sadly, journalism is important. Unfortunately, we aren’t getting any. We’re getting self-righteous lectures from arrogant know-nothings who, whenever possible, ignore their mistakes, which uniformly go in one direction – against Republicans. Is it any wonder that 86 percent of the public in a recent survey said they find either “a great deal” (49 percent) or “a fair amount” (37 percent) of bias in media? They used to at least pretend to be honest.

Of course, when you operate in an ever-shrinking bubble of likeminded colleagues, you don’t even notice the problem. A new study found “Beltway journalism 'may be even more insular than previously thought,'” which the authors say raises "'additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.'”

If there’s no one in your circle who knows any better, you’ll never think you’re wrong and not know when you’ve crossed a line. If everyone you know is polishing their resume in the hope of getting a job in a Biden administration, you’d better update yours too. If Joe loses, you can fill that hole in your heart with the awards you’ll be showered with for your biased, incorrect reporting. And you don’t have to worry about being haunted by thoughts of betraying the ideals of your profession since history starts all over again tomorrow.

SOURCE 





Australia: 'We are losing our rights over a virus with a 99% recovery rate': Defiant organiser of hippy drumming event at a Sydney beach vows to keep defying coronavirus restrictions

The organiser of a hippy drumming event has vowed to continue defying COVID-19  restrictions and labelled social distancing measures a 'totalitarian measure'. 

Sydney Drummers founder, Curt Hannagan, organised a gathering that saw 200 people pack onto Mistral Point at Maroubra in the city's east on Sunday.

Mr Hannagan unleashed an explosive social media rant on Tuesday after he was fined $1,000 for breaching coronavirus restrictions.

'We are having our rights and freedoms taken away from us over a virus with a 99 per cent recovery rate,' Mr Hannagan wrote on Facebook.

Mr Hannagan, who also goes by Curt Alchemy, established a GoFundMe page to help pay for the event's fine and purchase new drumming equipment. 

'Over 200 people gathered in Maroubra to collectively share their heart beat and connection to one another in a form of musical celebration for the human race and mother earth,' Mr Hannagan explained.     

He also added a post on the Sydney Drumming page that said the group would 'not submit to the current totalitarian measures here in Australia'.  

'These events are designed to heal ourselves, heal our trauma, and to create harmony within our body, mind and spirit,' Mr Hannagan said.

The drummer asked those who 'stand strong for you rights, for your freedoms' to 'donate any finances... so we can pay the fine and move forward.' He also shared plans to host another gathering and asked 'Who wants another secret location tribe fest in Sydney?'  'We will not submit, we will rise in community spirit,' Mr Hannagan said.

Maroubra residents called police after seeing the drumming party grow and officers arrived at about 6pm.

'Officers spoke with a 33-year-old man who was one of the organisers of the event.

'Police were able to disperse the crowd without incident,' a NSW Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia.

NSW Police said they issued the 33-year-old man with a $1,000 fine on Monday for failing to comply with COVID-19 regulations.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the event organisers for comment. 

According to New South Wales Health regulations no more than 20 people are allowed to gather outside in a public place.

The state recorded three new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, bringing the total number of cases to 3,770.  

One was a returned traveller in hotel quarantine, one has been linked to the funeral cluster in South Western Sydney and another case remains under investigation.

There were 13,736 tests undertaken in the most recent 24 hour period and 122 people are being treated for coronavirus.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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