Page 343 - Deception at work all chapters EBook

292 Deception at Work

It’s really that simple. An untrained investigator might think that more evidence would be
needed before going to trial. In fact, SCAN makes trials unnecessary. Guilt or innocence is so
much easier to discover by analysing words than by the old fashioned method of having to
prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sapir claims to know that John Ramsey is ‘an abuser and knows who killed his daughter [Jon
Benet].’ He analysed the CNN interview of the Ramsey’s done about a week after the murder
of their daughter. He knows this by Mr. Ramsey’s choice of words. Sapir also claims that
Magic Johnson got infected with HIV in a bisexual encounter. He knows this because Johnson
never said he wasn’t a bisexual, only that he wasn’t a homosexual, and he said he was certain
he got HIV from a woman. According to Sapir, using the word ‘certain’ indicates ‘a lack of
certainty’.

I wonder if he’s certain of that?
It doesn’t do much to instil faith in law enforcement when we see law enforcement officers
taking classes from people they should be investigating. In their defence, law enforcers claim
that things like SCAN, the polygraph and the voice stress analyzer ‘work.’ It helps them catch
the bad guys because some of the bad guys are ignorant and think these things can really
detect lies with some provable degree of validity. Some of the ignorant are intimidated into
confessing. They ‘work’ in the same sense that torture or extortion ‘work’. They get the result
you want some of the time.

In the name of science
Apparently, the only thing scientific about Scientific Interrogation and Scientific Content
Analysis is in the names. The patterns that Mr. Sapir thinks he sees are not supported by
any scientific studies. His folly has been seen before in cases like Judge Edward Jones and
personology.

Given that the Skeptics Dictionary holds itself out as the citadel of unbridled truths it is a
shame that it should misrepresent the facts and overlook the truth that SCAN is effective and
a very good tool for dealing with deception.

Mr Sapir’s analysis of the story referred to by the Skeptic’s Dictionary may be summarized
as in the table below:1

1 He does his analyses in a simple text, rather than tabular, format