The Toosbuy Method

Ninette Toosbuy is a 25 year veteran of law enforcement and criminal investigations based in Los Angeles, California. Toosbuy has focused her entire career working to perfect investigative techniques with an expertise in sex crimes. Her mastery of investigative interviewing was developed through years of experience interviewing thousands of people as well as obtaining specialized education through the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), an investigative interviewing school inspired by the British PEACE model collaborated between the Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). This education along with her extensive experience propelled Ninette to become the lead instructor of investigative interviewing and interrogations at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) which gave her the opportunity to develop a science-based curriculum and coach colleagues on interviewing techniques which are highlighted below.

How does an investigator get to the truth? 

In the early part of the 20th century, United States law enforcement overwhelmingly adopted the Reid Technique, which became the standard within the world of police interrogations. For decades, its methods were unequivocally accepted as best practices for police interviews. However, multiple studies conducted in the United States and Europe have shown that the Reid Technique can lead to false admissions. Reid’s guilt-presumptive, confrontational, and psychologically coercive style runs the risk of obtaining not just limited information from the interviewee but more troubling it compromises the quality and integrity of the information. In fact, according to the Innocence Project, of the approximately 360 falsely convicted Americans from 1992 to the present day who were exonerated through DNA evidence, 103 of them involved a false confession. That is nearly 30 percent of all wrongful convictions. Other organizations such as the National Registry of Exonerations have reached similar findings.

How then does an investigator determine who is telling the truth and who is not?

There are many misconceptions of how to tell the difference between a truth teller and a liar. The theory that all liars behave in a certain way such as anxiously shifting in their seat, divertive eye movements, or verbal stalls is simply not validated by science. Yes, some people when they lie do in fact display such “tells” but the reality is that many do not. So, if an investigator relies solely on the obvious “tells” (s)he is bound to make mistakes in his/her assessment of a person’s truthfulness. Studies have shown that people who lie or who are deceptive may or may not have visible “tells.” 

Determining whether someone is telling the truth must therefore be based on a carefully prepared science based investigative interview which means using techniques based on science and psychology, not hunches. 

What is science based investigative interviewing? 

Science-based interviewing refers to the concepts, strategies, and tactics of interviewing that have been developed and examined in empirical experiments and field validation studies. This approach focuses on thorough preparation by the interviewer before the interview itself; thoughtful preparation of the environment in which the interview will take place; an emphasis to active listening; the use of deliberate specific open-ended questioning formulated to elicit more rather than less information from the interviewee which in turn provides the interviewer with an increased ability to detect deception through the suspect’s narrative versus non-verbal indicators. Eliciting more rather less information from a subject generates a greater cognitive load in the liar which in turn increases the odds that (s)he will “trip up” and give information that is easily proven to be false. Lying on the fly to a person who is asking you to elaborate your narrative is difficult, as many of us know from personal experience.

Additionally, science-based interviews are not designed to elicit a confession but rather to gather information and facts about an incident in an effort to ultimately get to the truth. The more information an interviewer solicits from the interviewee, the more the interviewer can go back and check the information given. It is therefore critical for the interviewer to be an active listener and focus every word said in the interview as opposed to narrowing the dialogue with closed ended questions.