The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective sy aside of life, the average person is never exposed her I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Welcome back to Part two of my chat with Detective Senior Sergeant Chris Blake. Chris is a serving police officer with New Zealand Police and is the manager of the Behavioral Science Unit. Chris and his team of psychologists and
analysts provide operational support to major criminal investigations. In part one, we got the general sense of the type of support his team provides. In Part two, we talk in depth about how difficult complex investigations are approached. There is a science in the way cops go after the bad guys, and anyone interested in true crime will enjoy this conversation. Chris Blake, Welcome back to Part two off I Catch Killers.
Thanks, it's great still be here.
Got to admit I do enjoy speaking to the cops or ex cops or whatever it's. When you've been involved in the world for a long time, it's nice to chat to someone that understands that.
Will, Yeah, for sure. And because it's one of those things until you actually do it, it's really to articulate the exactly what goes on.
Now, I'll hit you up with a hard one right at the start. You are a bit of a crime nerd because you're also an author of a couple of fictional crime novels, The Sound of a Voice and the recently released Softly Calls the Devil, which I might add the New zeal And. Harold stated about the book harrowing, compelling and quite brilliant.
That's not bad.
Rap, it's not too bad.
Yeah, how did you fall into that space? Yeah?
Funny story that I didn't read a lot growing up. I think Biggles and Tinton were my favorites, and they're very much of a type, right, But wasn't a big reader, terrible at writing. I didn't understand English. Yeah, all didn't get it. And it wasn't until I was in the police and I worked with this guy called Simon Wyatt and he's a good maid of mine. Out of the blue, he just says to me, I've written this fiction book.
And I sort of looked at him and went in the back of my head, I'm like, that's your bucket list thing you do when you're sixty eight, and we try and put your novel together and hope it makes your grand kids some money or something.
Setting that that weekend, there were overlooking the lake and the mess as you're working away on your typewriter. Yeah, that's right, with.
The knitted jumper on. And so I look at go oh, like, what's it about? And he goes, oh, it's just a crime fiction novel, because hey, like we're cops. You know, we've got a lot of stories, and you know, you can come up with a fiction plot and then so
much to them. And I thought he was nuts. I just thought, no way, how could you compete with all of the crime fiction that's on the shelves, and he goes, Oh, the point of difference is we actually do it, so we can inject a little bit of that police procedure or stuff to the book without sort of bogging it down too much. The idea just sort of filtered away, and I went, all right, well, he's giving it a go. He's far more intelligent and better looking than I'll ever be,
but I'll give it a crack. So that was the first book was over several years. I just sort of pieced together a story and it was very much entrenched in meth manufacture and that organized crime sort of stuff. And I just watched season one of True Detective with Matthew McConaughey.
And fantastic was its.
Brilliant piece of scene, and that sort of inspired it completely. And that was one of the first shows i'd seen that everything about it was just bleak and dark and sinister, and it made me go, there's not a lot of stuff out there like that. So that first book was very very dark and got viewed and criticized for exactly that.
Too dark.
Yeah, very dark, and there's not a lot of light moments in it. So that was sort of an early four way into it, and then when I got round to writing the second one, I wanted to sort of make it a bit more marketable and yeah, a bit simpler, and inject a lot of a bit more light and humor into it than that first one, certainly, but so it would start off as a hobby, I guess someone else's idea. Now that it's turned into this, I still
still really believe it. I've only seen that. I've gone into the book shop yesterday and I can't believe there's a book bear with it, because I'm just an idiot who grew up in Glenfield and Auckland.
Did you find it relaxing? Was it something that you could relax?
It wasn't sort of bringing your work home and there's your sitting there writing this book.
Yeah, no, it is. It is good, right, and like it's it's escapist fiction, so there is authenticity and the police work, but the plot is you know, it's it's it's something people will hopefully want to read, so I do enjoy you can sit there and write the story you want to write, rather than the real world, where things often work out the way that anybody wants them
working out. So it is really good like that, and I think being crime fiction, you know, you if you also work in the police, to come up with the story or two, you know, whereas I could never write science fiction or anything like that, and to write what you know. So like my wife would tell you that I certainly shouldn't write near romance, but stick with what you know and like crime fiction.
I hope you dedicated the book to your wife.
The front the Counterbalance. I had one opportunity. I was invited to write a chapter and the fictional crime book, and that was just a lot of different writers and I've done nonfiction writing and played with my mind. I'm sitting there and thinking, Okay, I've got to make this really sick, and I'm almost like had the whiteboard out trying to work the crime out, and then who stupid, This is fiction.
You can take it wherever you want it.
And yeah, but I always ask, I'm always interested with people that write that fictional crime novel. Do you know the ending or do you just start writing and take it where it goes?
Yeah, I'm all over the place, like I don't have a myth at at all, because you know, I'm not a writer by trade, so looking up the rough idea, and for this one, it was I'm going to sit in Hearst to New Zealand there's going to be a murder and maybe a colt involved, and that I now have to just start writing and I go, okay, what would the cop do next? So I write what they
do next in real life? And then that's really boring, so then I just have to tweak it slightly and then it sort of goes that way now, which is quite good. And now I've got this character. I just kind of sit there and I go, okay, I know what I would do, and I know what the police should do, but what would Matt Bukennan do? And you can kind of take me on those more fictional plot lines that the real police wouldn't actually.
Do, wouldn't wouldn't do.
And I suppose you had to become more descriptive in your writing because the writing I've done, the feedback I got initially was that would be a good fact sheet Gary, but we're trying to give people something a little bit more descriptive. Not I arrived at seven am on the twenty seventh of November.
Yeah, that type of thing.
My gloves and I put another pair on and yeah, I struggle with that too, and I probably the one thing I try and put a lot of into my as a realistic dialogue between between people. Yeah, that's where policing background comes and really handy is not so much the plot itself, but how people actually talk to each other and how cops and people are dealt with and
spoken to. So it's rich in dialogue, which actually helps with not being able to describe the rest of it because it comes out in the conversations people are having. And that's how I kind of deal with that with no creative running background, and probably learn the most from reading books that I didn't like and going, h, that was a terrible way to tell that story, or people don't talk like that to each other, and going well, I'll never do that, and then just trying to do it.
Yeah, yeah, I understand. You mentioned the first season of True Detectives. What I liked about that was the conversations between the two partners that had that sense of reality about it. Yeah, you're just trying to when you get paired up as a detective and people, unless you've worked at least you don't fully understand you can be not even know the person, and then within you meet them, and then you're away of that person on the most
intense experience you possibly could have. And the conversations that flow in the police car when you're driving across the state or wherever leading into the jobs are quite intense. But I like the subtlety of the way they delivered that because it was very real to me.
Oh, it was incredibly well done right. And when I think back now on that show, and I've watched that season so many times, but still the memory that crops up is them both just sitting in a car driving somewhere. It's so realistic to portray it that at the start they both just hate each other, you know, and do some horrible things to each other throughout the court thing. And I hope, I don't want to blow this for anyone that's going to watch this and then watch the show.
But there's that beautiful moment where they i'd say beautiful from a fictional TV perspective, where Matthew McConaughey really covers what he Harrelson's ass and despite everything that's happened between the two of them, you know, he's still there when
it counts. And then their relationship in the aftermath. And I think that's the most realistic part is if you work alongside someone, you go to some pretty tragic, horrific things, and that just instantly builds a bond that you know, you know you can bring that person years from now. And I still do it around the country. People have worked with work in different areas and it's like you're just you're sitting having a beer with them, like and
you might not have seen them for ten years. It's incredible.
Yeah, well it captured the intensity but also the subtlety of what happens in that police car when two people are put together that might be pole or opposites, but they've got to work together for a common good.
Yeah, it's quite interesting.
Okay, off the fiction, let's get back into your unit. And I think it's fair to say that the way that we approach criminal investigations talking criminal investigations, there's a tepic approach and breaking that down, we're looking at deductive reasoning that comes into an investigation. These are the type of things that detectives come to you to sort of when I say deductive reasoning, is that something that you can offer investigators like advice that you give them on the way to approach it.
Yeah, definitely, so the psychologists on the team can do that. They so that unknown offender profiling, which I guess is original criminal profiling that all units do. There isn't a lot of that these days because we often catch our murderers pretty quickly twenty century CCTV, telephones, cell phones, polling, dash cans, all sorts of stuff going on for end, not to mention forensics. So there's a murder and usually within within hours, the majority of murders are solved and
someone's been arrested. Those cases from the sixties, seventies, and eighties that fueled a lot of what the FBI did. Those serial killers that got away with it for so long. That drove that unknown offender profiling, which is the genesis of some of our units. Not a lot of it these days, but they still do do it, usually for
cold cases, for unsolved historical homicides. And Yeah, so they'll do a crime analysis, which sounds very similar to like a crime scene examination, except they're very much looking at it from that offender behavior perspective. So rather than going, okay, he broken through that window, he went over there, he opened the drawer, left his fingerprints. He tossed that over here. He took that because it's missing, because we've usked the
owner of what's missing, and he's walked over there. They do have that in there, but they're going, why did he break him through that window? Where had he been before that? How did he know that windows even there? That means he must have been watching from somewhere. Where would he be watching from? Is that high risk or is that low rist behavior? If it's somewhere where it'll be incredibly high risk to watch that window, then this is the kind of person or personality we're looking at.
Versus if it's a low risk thing, you're probably looking somewhere else. And we can see when I see the sites on the team do this, you know you're blown away by how how logical it is. Yeah, at the same time something I could never do. Ye, And it's all based on their both academic and practical experience as psychologists before they came into the team.
That's an interesting way to put it.
It's got that combination, hasn't it That that's what a good criminal psychologist, That the type that I was fascinated and speaking to Nathan from your team. But that's they've got the practical experience with the academic qualifications, and yeah, I would you've just thrown yourself on the sword there, I frow myself on the sword. Sometimes I'd be sitting there and thinking, yeah, of course it's fairly obvious, and I'd be walking way making notes going why didn't I think of that?
Yeah, it's you know, the FBI and the eighties, they're talking to offenders and it was Pooperter's witchcraft for so long, but so much research and science done since that. Yeah, is an academic discipline and yeah, just the knowledge that they have is incredible.
Yeah, and a good psychologist also draws on the experience of an experienced police officer.
So that's a combination of skills that they have.
So I've just got a list of the type of things that your unit, how they support the investigators, and I just work through a few of them that I want to want to talk about. Suspect prioritization. Now, from a detective's point of view, that's always a hard thing to do. Where do you start when a crime has happened. Depending on the crime, you might have hundreds of suspects and how do you prioritize which suspect?
What does your you that bring to detectives that turn up there.
And I'll use examples of you know, when the child disappears, who's in the area at the time, who was known to the child, when was the child last scene alive? Who becomes a suspect? How do you work through the prioritization.
Yeah, I mean so we do mainly in the sexual space. And yeah, this example is going to be really it's going to sound like it's one oh one, but it obviously far more complicated than this. But you know, if you have a case where an intruder is disturbed at the foot of someone's bed, you know, and then they leg it, and that's what you're facing. You know, when you look at that from an evidential perspective, you go, well, he broke and he stood at the bed and then
he left. He didn't take anything, But we've got a burglary. That's the way it'll be coded, and that's the way it'll be treated, and they'll be looking for a burglar and then if it comes to us, we'll go we'll hang on a minute, or why didn't he take anything? And why was he standing at the foot of the bed, and we're going to say that this is a sexually motivated crime, So we need to be looking for a sexual offender or at least somebody who has that sexual
fantasy element to what they've done. And so we're looking at a history of sexual offending. Maybe some burglary, but that sexual part is far more important. So our suspect priority list would be very geared towards you know, devancies, you know, voyeurism, stealing clothes, off lines, that stuff would be way more important than someone who's got a massive history of breaking into houses and taking money. Yeah, you
know what I mean. So that would be Yeah, that's how they sort of go about that is what have we actually got, What does that mean for the offender? And therefore, what does their background look like, because that's going to help inform that priority suspect list, is their background and who they were before this moment in time.
And giving that perspective on it allows because then you've got to prioritize who you're targeting first, like from the police, who you're targeting, like eliminating that suspect list, the smaller suspect list. If you're on the right track is better than having a large one. So I understand what you're saying there. And for the experience, that would okay, it's
just a break in that could have been anyone. But the breaking where someone wakes up and someone's standing the end of the bed in the bedroom at night, that's to an experienced person I suppose saying, well, there's a warning there that person was what was he's doing in there?
What was motivating?
That's right exactly. And you know even where the houses, right, so you know that happens, and a lot of people will go, well, it could have been anyone. You go, hang on, that's the third house back down the driveway you can't driving past. So no, this isn't just anyone. This would have been incredibly high risk for somebody to just be wandering around doing this like that's not what
these types of offenders do. So it's got to be somebody local who or lives in the area or frequently in that area to actually even know there's a house down there with someone in it. That then is the genesis for this crime. So that shrinks your geographical search as well, right, and so all of that comes into it as well. And there are things that at first glance you just go, this is need on the haystack. We're you ever going to get anywhere.
But it's a way of way of trimming things down the crime scene. In that analyst at the crime scene, do you look at the crime scene if a murder's happened, do your psychologists have a look and go, okay, what have we got here? The obvious one is if someone has been their face has been attacked, the general consensus is okay, well it was something personal. It's not always a case in my experience, as I say it, but there's things that you can tell from a crime scene.
From a detect this point of view, I'd look at the crime scene and think, okay, well the weapon had been available at the location, so perhaps they didn't turn up with the intent to murder. If a weapon's been introduced, they've come there with the intent to murder. Little things like that give me some examples of what your team might provide when the cops or the detectives turn up and go, this is what we found at the crime scene.
How do they break that down?
Yeah? I mean, and they do go out when they can. We're based in Auckland, so unfortunately Auckland gets a lot of use out of us. Yeah, it doesn't cost any money to walk out the door. The rest of the country sort of messes out on that.
I can tell you're still in the place.
So as much as they can, Yeah, and Serena, the two psychologists on the team, will get out on the ground if there's an unsolved case, and even the solved ones, they'll get out and look at the scenes. And to be fair, they're probably not doing it so much from a It's not like some of the shows on TV where they walk in and they're like aha, and all the detectives have no idea, So help frame it in their heads so that then when they write the report they have actually they've seen how far away A is
from B. All that kind of good stuff. But yeah, that real basic level, it's understanding what drives whatever the particular offenses and then being able to go, well, this is this kind of offense. So that example you just
gave Gary, you know, about a violent homicide. If you walk into a house and there's just blood and bits and pieces absolutely everywhere in six different rooms, you know, like that is that's if we're not talking some sort of major mental struggle or psychosis or nations or something.
You know, that is that's anger, and that is emotion, you know, so that is unlikely to be a complete stranger because an emotion of personal things so huge sweeping generalization for those really violent scenes, if that's not organized crime related for a purpose, generally somebody that's known to the whereas the other end of the spectrum is more
the other way. So when it's I don't like to use the word cleaner, but less frenzied, less all over the place, less anger involved in it, you know, that would be more along that sort of serial offender, fantasy driven, purpose driven offending where the offenders are getting something out
of it. So that's that whole organized verse. Disorganized offender, cleaner crime scene, organized planned, thought about blood everywhere, disorganized, didn't plan it got out, three things got out of hand, and now we have this all out of it.
Yeah, And those type of things are what generate the discussion in the briefing room when you're looking at trying to work out what's happened, and it's create case theories or directions of the people you're looking for. I always found a lot I could tell by the way the body was disposed of that that's always a good indicator. What's your thoughts on that?
Yeah, totally right. Again, unless you're suffering under some major mental illness, no matter what's just gone down, disposing of a body has got to be it's something I can't wrap my head around. Like what we're going through your head at the time. I'm imagining a lot of panic, a lot of stress, and a lot of anxiety. And yeah, the whole time. If you're trying to avoid law enforcement
is going to guide you a lot. But if you had a close relationship with this person you've just killed, that's going to dictate a lot of how you go about things, too right. And that's where you know, if it was a close ex partner and then there's a dismemberment, for example, all those things go into it too right. The panic and stress has obviously overtaken the other emotions
through that. But if the body's just left where it is, that's more like a well, I just fucked up in a major way, But the police are going to come and get me, and I'm going to leave them there because they need to be dealt with properly, you know, So we and usually we haven't had the serial killer thing, unlike Ossie and the States. And I don't know whether that's geographically because we're small jurisdiction. We certainly have people
in prison. I'm sure that may well have gone on and killed again, but they get picked up after their first murder. So we don't have a lot of experience in that serial murderer space where you'd start to see staging of bodies and all that kind of stuff, or a pattern to the disposal.
Yeah, yeah, you see, I see a lot of panic in the way the bodies are disposed of, and that quite often tells tells me a lot. You know, where the body has been half buried, and that people clearly didn't have the have the intent for the murder to happen, that something's happened, and they're panic because you talked about
the trauma of disposing of a body. So many people that I've come across during the time as a homicide detective that it's just it's horrifies them that they've killed or kill the person, and quite often that it wasn't their intent, but it's just evolved or a moment lapse of and it's confronting for people, and they quite often panic in the way they respond immediately after.
Yeah, and people are I mean, everyone's inherently lazy, right, Like everyone by design is looking for the path of least resistance. What's the easiest way to achieve the aim here? And body disposal? Is that? Right? All the research that up as I've got to get rid of this, what's the easiest way to do that. I'm not going to take any risks and drive thousands of miles with a body in my car. I'm going to go somewhere I know that's secluded. How am I going to do this?
I'm not going to spend eight hours, yeah, digging twelve meters down. I'm going to do this in the simplest way possible to try and sort it out. And so that guides a lot of that body disposal stuff that the psychologist st is that the path of least resistance, where's the obvious secluded location. Whereas the you know, you're not going to drag a body through a heavy jungle for a kilometer that's too hard. You're not going to
drag it up hill that's too hard. You're going to go downhill less trees places like that because people are generally lazy.
Well, I had someone that we're searching for a body that he disposed of, and he indicated he'd gone that far into the bush. And this was years later when we're trying to recover the body. And where he first showed this, where he believed he buried the body. It was in the National Park. It was a long way into the bush. And two I should take credit, but
I can't. It was Sarah's idea. We put a manequin body in the back in the boot of a car, drove down to the location in the middle of the night at the same time that he disposed of the body. And when we got there, we hadn't told him we had this. It was what the rescue squad used to train the carry people out of fires and different things. So it weighed about eighty kilos, had the composure of a body, had it in the boot of the car, and said, okay, we popped the boot.
Look in the boot of the car.
We want you to demonstrate how you drag that drag the body that far. He was surprised by that, and on that basis he sort of wound back and thought, Okay, maybe I didn't go one hundred and fifty meters in the bush. Maybe it was only thirty meters that changed the area where we were searching. But that's the panic
of people trying to dispose of the body. Another thing that I see you do, and this is a big issue in criminal investigation in homicide, is the equivocal death review, determining whether this death is misadventure, if it's an accident, or is it murder. Do your people help out on that as.
Well, Yeah, for sure, And more and more lately, there have been a couple of high profile cases in the meat recently, and so that's generating a bit of interest there. So we are getting more and more requests when there's you know, when it appears to be a suicide, they will reach out to us. And that's one of those areas where I'm so glad that it's the psychologist doing that stuff, because you know, and you'll be the same garrier you go to. So many tragic suicides in the police.
So many of them are in ambiguous circumstances or you go, man, that's so tragic that that person had to decide that that was the way out for them. And there are so many variations of it that I can't even a picture of being able to be academically experienced enough to say, well, actually this is indicative of this, that or the other thing.
But there is so much research and it's all just based on the research overseas, right is things found in this way indicators that maybe a few more questions should be asked or a few more conducted, and so it's all it's very academic based on research of similar cases
with similar things. And yeah, there was the recent case here in New Zealand Pauline Hannah died and her husband was acquitted at trial, and that's progressing through the coronial stage, as happens with everything like that, and so that's raised the interest in that equivocal death space. So Nathan Nathan's doing a lot of work in that space for us.
But it's a really hard one. It's just so you know, it's one of those cases you don't know what, you don't know, how do you know where you're going with that?
And if it's broken down and not talking specific cases, but if it's broken down that okay, death's happened, that it's unnatural, but was it suicide or wasn't a suicide, they were the most difficult ones. I was called out to his homicide whether when I was on the teams, Yeah, called out that I prefer I know this is a murder. I'm going to put the effort into it. It's simpler to solve when the first part of it are we even dealing with a murder here, That can be very,
very difficult. So that type of input I think we used to seek on the rare occasions, I think, and I might be using the wrong terminology, but it was a psychological autopsy in dissecting, dissecting the person, did they have that predisposition for committing suicide? Where they indicators that type of thing that I found helpful. Invariably they were used more so at the coronial inquests and the murder trials.
Yeah, definitely, And yeah, that's the right terminology. So the psychological is the syches will do those often for our critical incidents, which is usually when somebody's died during a police during police and they'll do those, and again it's to inform the coronial side of things, is to stitch together the behavior of the person and the lead up to that event to hopefully try and figure a few things out and maybe prevent a few things in the future,
but that an equivocal depth, pretty much the same, same, very similar, trying to work out the steps leading up to it. And does this look the way it looks? Yeah, for a reason that's strange or just because crazy things happen, and people of.
People linking crimes, do they help help with that?
Like again with and we we don't have had the backpack of Ivan Malatt murders. We had the granny killers, We've had a few others, but we don't have a whole spate of serial killers. But I've worked on matters where we're trying to link crimes and what I what I struggled with this crime has three children that were murdered, that what was a motivation and the different ages in the in the children, different sexes in the in the children. And I was looking at it from a we got
we've got a serial killer. Here is this person motivated because he wants to kill people, whether the age of the child or the sex of the child. And what again with Sarah, she came, she did a report on it that the person was driven by sexually motivated in that he wasn't killing the people for the sake of killing the people. He was driven by a sexual motivation to if I kill this person, I can have sex with that person. There was a sexual motivation to it.
For years, I worked on that, and I always struggled when I was having high level meetings with legal people in the game. But yeah, what are we saying here? What was the motivation for these three crimes being linked? And then it became very apparent when Sarah broke it down that Hobot the motivation wasn't to murder people. The motivation was sexual gratification, and he was prepared to kill for that sexual gratification. And I thought that was interesting how the crimes were linked that way.
Yeah, very much. So. Yeah, so that's what they add to it, is that victimology stuff is so such a massive chunk of it to working out the motivations of the offender. And often, you know, as detectives, we don't look at that as much as perhaps we should. But yeah, if you've got three people dead, Yeah, it's not necessarily someone just loves killing. There might be a specific reason
why each one of the three are killed. This one was a sexual motivation, but then the other two you know, you're talking about destroying evidence or getting rid of witnesses. You know, that's a differentation that can completely color the investigation. But most of the linkage for us is that lower level sexual offending, so the indecent assaults, the touching people on buses, assaulting, assaulting people in parks. And it is amazing to see the behavioral analysts because that's their gam
rather than the psychologists. You know, if we have a stranger sexually offend and a park and Towering a they can look through their but behavioral database. They know exactly what they're looking for and based on how the offender went about this crime yesterday, they can pull out all these cases from years gone by and go, actually, you're looking for this guy because he did the same thing
in Dunedin two years ago. And they can nominate a suspect straight away, and then tower will go, well, that's Manny actually lives in Towering and now and we'll go, whoa, that's a surprise, and then they'll go through the evidential identification process with the victim to get there. So it's incredible to see them and the rest of our police systems can't do it. They don't search behavior the same way that our unit can with our database.
Do they use by class?
Is that that's exactly what they use.
Okay, so that's what we've got over here as well. So yeah, yeah.
So Canadian system and yeah, it's incredible. I'm still figuring out how to use it. It would be quite bright to use it. Yeah, so they can.
It's great to be the manager of this unit. By the sounds of it, they can. They can surround yourself with good people. Chris, you'll be fine. One will no one will realize you're the fake.
The terrible thing is they all know. But they can link the Yeah, if there's an offender that's you know, if he's in the system before for doing it and he's been convicted, then they can nominate the suspect. Often they're link crimes together. And this is where it would come in handy for Thompson and Rewa. The districts might not know who the offender is, but the unit can
go Actually, you've got a serial offender here. You've got a guy that's done this nine times in the last two years in the same park, and you guys haven't picked it up because there's enough space between each one that people just forget or they don't look back. I don't think they're connected, but it's the same person. And then we can generate a little bit of resource by going to the district commander and saying you've actually got
a serial offender. Might want to inject some resource there when they can pile a team on it to actually look at it, which can often be all you need to uncover an offender when no one else was previously looking at it and giving those timing windows and all that sort of stuff. So even when they don't can't nominate an offender, it's really helpful to link those things together and hey, Wellington, you might want to paw some resources into.
This well, And that's the thing we haven't touched on here. With cerial offenders, the fact is you're trying to be proactively prevent further crimes from occurring. So the mention just your unit being able to carry the weight that yeah, you're looking at the potential cereal offender here. That's going to attract more resources because the people in position to allocate the resources can't ignore the fact that more crimes might be committed unless proper resources are put on the case.
That's right, and that's risk, isn't It's like they're going to keep doing this, Yeah, find them and stop them there, right, there is the motivation.
Yeah, Okay.
Interviewing approaches we talked in part one about whether they kick the door in at six am with the sledgehammer and start yelling, or whether you pick up the phone and invite the person to come in. What sort of help do you guys provide with interview plants or the way they approach And is it the stick or the carrot? Which which way is going to best suit the circumstances.
Yeah, I mean overwhelmingly it's that rapport based approach as most of the advice we give, and then that's that's tailored to the individual based on their life experiences and things like that. The psychologists do advise on those ones where there is a mental health issue there, you know,
if it's got something going on. Yeah, they'll give that advice because they'll say, well, this personality needs maybe a little bit more direct questioning because they're not going to understand it otherwise, all that sort of safeguard stuff they'll do. And then myself and then will just give the general advice. But it's overwhelmingly or based an empathetic For most cases, I've never I've never known a really harsh adversarial interview
approach to result in an admission of truth. That happens, right, but there's always probably another reason behind it. Either the suspect was always going to admit it, or the weight of the evidence was so overwhelming that they decide to admit it. But it's generally not because if the police interview as being a real dick, they're probably not going to sit there and go, man, I really appreciate the
way you're treating me. I'm going to tell you the truth is not a lot cool thought process for anybody, So that empathetic approach is far more likely to not resulting in admission. It's about keeping them in the room, happy to be there talking to you, and the more conversation you can have with them, the far more likely it is that you're going to end up trusting each other enough to actually start talking about something even remotely close to what the truth is.
Yeah, and you have a fender leakage too.
If you have a conversation long enough, invariably something is something that slips out that they were trying to trying to keep away and just in the conversation they lose it because spinning a lie or a yarm or denying something that you've done is hard. If the conversation is going for a long time.
That's right, and you know, want to shoot yourself in the foot too. If the person sitting across from you has nothing to do with it, well, you don't want to create the next generation of people who are going to hate the police, because if you're treating them that way and they've got nothing to do with it, or even if they do, well, I'd walk away hating the police as well. So no matter no matter what the circumstance, just being normal and treating them with a bit of respect,
you can't really go wrong. And if they're always going to deny it, well then they probably always would and there's not much the bat approaches.
Quite often I have discussions or had discussions who's the best person to be in the interview room with and you look at the person. Do they respect authority or someone experience or you're better off sending a junior police officer in male female is often a different combination. Sometimes it's much better to send the female detect event to do the interviewing. Is that sort of thing discussed with the unit with the interview planning, Yeah, a little bit.
The psychologists get pretty heavy on that, and they can give some pretty good steers to an investigation team. But I try and temper that a little bit, because yeah, I'm a passionate believer in that. You know, anybody should be able to do an interview, and if all you're trying to do is generate that rapport, well, if you're a detective, you should be able to step into an
interview room and have a conversation with someone. So often it's as nuanced as who's the type of person that can probably has the closest life journey to this person that we're actually trying to You know, if somebody, if the person you're interviewing has got kids, well let's make sure the detective that's interviewing them has kids, because they talk of children, they can genuinely talk about their own if they're comfortable doing that to whatever detailed level they're comfortable, right,
because then building that common ground, So trying to find the interviewer that can have that natural common ground rather than trying to make it up or or pretend. It's probably the most useful thing. So totally depends on the suspect what they've done. But yeah, just someone in the room that can actually sit there and have a conversation about similar type things that they might be interested in or can relate in some way.
Do you are the detectives buying into this? More and more?
Still resistance because some of the old school why do we need these doctors in I'm not going to have a psychologist or whatever you call them in the interview room or advising mate get out of here.
There was that resistance.
I would imagine that it's changing and people are seeing the benefits of it.
Yeah, definitely, And I think part of that's down to the approach, right if you know, if you didn't come there and say, you know, this is how you should do it, or what you know, what you do is bad and this is good, and I'm going to teach you how to do this differently, totally the wrong way to get by in anything. Yeah, so we more sort of go you know, there's always been great interviewers, you
know history, They've been fantastic interviewers. No one's and no one's created anything new by saying interviews should be report based, all that is is putting a label on all.
Of the good interviewers we're doing all that time.
That's right. So that's how we frame it as we say, you've done plenty of good work. Here's a word for the good stuff you've done. This is why it works, and so do that and that you're giving yourself the best opportunity. And they'll go, Okay, that makes sense because everyone's had conversations either inside the police or out inside to relate it to that and say that is how you need to be talking to this person. You know how to do it, you're great at it. That's what
this is called. And do that in there, rather than saying here's a whole new style of interviewing, which no one's doing, because that's just not the case. People have been still and are doing it.
I think that where I've seen some interviews fail is where people try to do something then it's not natural for them to Like I've seen people get stuck, and it's not through lack of effort that they're trying. They've seen someone that's got an interview style like this and they want to adopt that, but it doesn't come across the same way. If Joe's doing it instead of Peter's doing it, you know.
It's completely different. So mistakes made there.
But again and clearly your guys are on song with it, not coming in and telling this grumpy old detective, look, you've got to ask him this. They're not writing out the questions. They're just suggesting an approach.
It's entirely Yeah, we're not doing the interview plan or any of that. We're just saying this is how I go about doing this.
Yet well, and people are starting to become more aware because I remember very early with our psychologists that we're using at work. Initially they thought, oh that must be for people who are suffering post traumatic stress. Didn't comprehend us to enhance investigations.
And they are approached, do you want to interview this suspect, as in they've got this miracle, like the psychologists is just going to walk in and oh, yeah, leave it with me, I'll interview the suspect. So I think we are becoming more more aware of it.
Another thing that you do, which is I think this is a pressure a part risk assessment of offenders. So yeah, I'm assuming that might be on bail issues and different things like that. Is that come into play reports for.
The Yeah, mainly around so a lot of those gray zones like stalking and things like that, but definitely sexual offenders. So investigators and the courts all want to know, is this person going to do it again? You know, can we release them on bail or is that a risk to the public or was this a one off that has nothing to do with the wider public. So the psychologists will support those and just give their independent opinion, so it can go one way or the other. So
definitely or in the sexual space. Sometimes in the family violence space, well, very similar stuff. You know, is this person at risk if the offender is out on bail or is this not something that's going to carry on? But then yeah, Ever since christ Church in twenty nineteen, the national security environment, yeah, has really overtaken a lot
of the work that the unit does. So a lot of risk assessments in that counter terrorism grievance fueled violence space to be able to help the investigation teams go, is this person that's saying all the stuff actually going to come through all that stuff?
Yeah, Well, and that is an area of concern as we I think we touched on in part one about ideology, when does the ideology become put into practice their thoughts. That's concerning We've talked about victimology and the important of victimology, just to explain to people what that's about. If someone's been murdered, what what are we looking at with victimology? Like, I know how important it is, and that's probably the first thing we're looking at when we attended a murder scene.
What's your your your take on victimology and the importance of that to a criminal investigation.
Yeah, I means particularly when the offender is a stranger, right, that's when that's when that really comes into it because and you've got to be really careful talking about not confusing it with victim blaming. Completely different, And it's a shame because when sometimes we talk about victimology, it can come across that way, which is completely not the way
it's intended. It's about trying to work out what brought the two together is because they're right, there is their answer to everything, right, So what brought the offender into the path of the victim, and the victimology is looking at it from the victim's perspective, So who were they, what did their life look like, where did they go on every single day, what were they doing on that day, and why where were they when they cross paths with
the offender because that really informs your idea on who the offender might be. Because, for example, if they've got a routine every single week, and during one of those routine, things they've cross passed with the offender, will potentially the offender's been watching them for a long time. If they did something that's completely out of their routine and cross paths with the offender, it's unlikely that it's anything other than an opportunistic offender that's taken advantage. So two very
different avenues for an investigation team to go down. So victimology is just learning everything that you can about the victim.
And then invariably learning about the victim, it opens the line of inquiry that you're looking for. We're always behind the eight ball when we haven't identified the victim. That makes a murder investigation very hard from the outset when you haven't identified the victim, because it doesn't really give you a starting point. Personality profiles do you get into that, like what's motivating the person that type of thing.
Yeah, Like, we do do them, and the unit used to do them quite a lot, and they're quite academic, and they're sort of saying, this is who the person is, and they're not massively different too, like and you've got your intel profiles with all and all that kind of stuff, But they're adding a whole lot of richness into personality and their relationships with people and why they have those relationships, any mental illnesses or behaviors that might But we've found
with those profiles in and of themselves, they're not actually useful operationally in the form that they're in, but they're really useful to inform something else. So they're really helpful to inform a suspect interview, for example. So what we sort of do now is if someone comes to us saying, can you do a personality profile, we'll say, but what would you like it for? And we'll try and wait
it towards whatever they want it for. So if they say, oh, well, wouldn't like as much as we know about them so we can interview them, we'll go cool, how about we give you some interview advice and there'll be a lot of that personality stuff in there too, just trying to help the investigation teams rather than just doing our thing and giving it to them and going there.
You go, I'm I'm poor to take these as the city there? What does it mean? Yeah?
Pronounce it? Which is still me trying to read them so very much, trying to target what they're trying to achieve and then working backwards. And there may be elements of a personality profile in it.
And that could be as simple, I suppose as yeah, this person responds well to authority or this person who doesn't respect authority. It could be little triggers like that that help the way that you might approach the interview.
Yeah, totally. And it's looking through every little record and you know about them because I don't know if the AUSSI police systems are the same as ours, but they're really skewed to all that safety information that you need
to know. When you have a real quick glance at it, someone can look really really violent or really scary, But then you look deeper and you go, well, actually, traffic cop pulled them over last week and they were nice as pie and complemented the police officer on their nice haircut, and you go that is worth so much more to if you're gonna have to go and interview this person then at quick.
Glance, yeah, yeah, those details. Do your team go out and involve themselves in the briefings, like is it all done one on one or do they actually attend the briefing and explain to the investigative team.
Yeah, I've done a little bit of that. And you get sort of put on the spot. You're getting pulled into a major crime investigation and everyone's in there, and I really have to just back up the truck when I'm asked and I go, you know, you guys have lived and breathed this investigation since it began. You know that people far better than anyone on my team could just by reading about them. So you've got to go with your knowledge, and all will try and do is
add a few nuggets. The psychologists try and get out when they can. They'll certainly monitor interviews and things like that, but we're sort of just hamstrung by the fact we get so many requests. We're really stuck in the office just trying to deal with them all, and we'd love to be able to get out on the ground more, but really hard being a National team stuck in Auckland.
And I don't want to put yourself on the spot here because you're still employed by the police, But do you see this as a growing area? Do you think police forces across the board, because I'm sure you're communicating with other police forces, do you think everyone's buying into what a unit like yours can can provide?
Yeah? I think so, And I don't you know, because law enforcement is about people and psychology is people, so that just makes perfect sense, right, Yeah, But I don't know where that goes in the future because it cops these days are far more psychologically aware than they were
when I started nineteen years ago. Yeah, your insines and it's fantastic, and it's getting the knowledge out there and seeding it amongst the organization and as much as we can, we try and put out, you know, generic advice that's helpful going forward, so that we're not getting asked the same thing over and over again. It's like, here's this piece of research, you can read it, and you've got
it now, so now you're armed with it. There's a lot of that going on, So I think they'll be buy in and that will result in a massive uptake and just the general knowledge of investigators around human behavior and psychology. We're seeing an increase in that anyway, and you're getting interested in it and reading books and all that kind of stuff's going on. So I don't think that will result in our unit getting bigger, but it will result in a general knowledge increase across the board.
Yeah, approach to it. Okay, Well, look, I think it's fascinating the work that the work that you're doing. I get the sense I'm saying this lightheartedly. You're hanging out with psychologists enough because I can then never pin them down to a director like a specific answer like could be maybe yeah, maybe so, but that but that is that is their science, isn't it.
It's not an absolute no, and.
There's exceptions for everything. So they have to they have to look at all the research and all the experience and put it together. And so you're never going to get one hundred percent anything. And then that's where the detectives come in and they go, well, it's sixty one percent. That's so that's the one that it probably is, and they'll go, you can't look at it like that, and you know, so it's good to have that balance.
Is a good balance, so I think it changes it changes dynamics having access to that sort of experience. I want to get your thoughts on crime, and you touched on it. But one of the things that from something that you've written that I just want to read back to you and then get your thoughts to expand on that, and I put it under the heading of your thoughts on crime From you, I've developed an institutionally frowned upon empathy with offenders, not empathy necessarily with their actions, but
with them as people. How we can truly understand if we haven't walked in those shoes. Judgment is for the courts. Police can do their job right without being dicks and starting a new cycle of prejudice already and defending. I pulled that out because I think it says a lot about your approach, and certainly, sitting down having this chat with you, I see where it's coming from.
Do you want to just expand on what you meant by that paragraph?
Yeah, I mean nineteen years and my career hasn't been colored by what I'd say a lot of evil. Right, So you read about some cases and Ossie's had them. Where you go, man, that really is just some next level darkness happening there. But I've never I've never experienced that myself, Like I've never sat across an interview table from someone and gone, you are just one hundred percent. Yeah,
it's far more. You're a human being and you've made some mistakes, and your toolbox for dealing with hard things is not the same as my toolbox, and whose fault that is? Who knows? You know, you could argue it in one research paper and argue a different thing in another, but by and large, you know, if someone commits a murder, they didn't wake up that morning unless they're a contract killer. I'm going to kill somebody this afternoon. But it ends
up that way. And that's not at all taken away from the fact that they've made a decision to take a life and they should face the consequences of that. But there's so much more to their life and background than that one moment, So understanding that, recognizing it and putting yourself there and going if I'd live their life
and whatever that is. And let's go down the cliche one, which is a really difficult childhood, really difficult adolescence, victim of all sorts, of abuse, drugs funneled into a gang because there's nowhere else that will take care, and you find a little sense of camaraderie there, not similar to joining the army or the police or a sports team. And then once you're there, there's that social validation aspect.
You know everyone's doing this, so I'm going to do it too, And so you end up in a place where you're not as well equipped as a lot of people to deal with terrible situations. Maybe running away isn't your default setting and someone ends up dead. Now I can very much understand that for some people when they take a life for them in that moment, for whatever reason, they thought it was the right thing to do for themselves, and wrapping our heads around that and going how is
that even possible? How could they have ever thought that that was the right thing to do. That's the key to it, because if you can understand that and empathize, that makes that interview room such a more positive place to be than the adversarial place it has been for decades. So I guess it comes from a place of suspect inter viewing, but trying to recognize that you know, I'm sitting across the table from a murderer nine years old.
They weren't out killing people, so there's some element of there's got to be some element of humanity to that, right, and understanding that journey they've been on is crucial to perhaps keeping that door open so you can keep the conversation going.
Yeah.
Look, I highlighted Chrispy because I wanted you to explain that in your words. But it reinforces something that I think I was aware of during the police but certainly outside the police and sitting in the position I am now speaking to people. I respect the in law enforcement, and one of the things that carried all the way through with all the good detectives, I knew if I had to describe, and people think it's so strange, what's the characteristics of the best detectives.
You've worked with?
Empathy? They all carry a heavy carry a lot of empathy for people. They understand and when they crack the case and people don't know what goes on in the interview room and they think it's been aggressive, violent, it's quite often, as you've described here, sitting down just talking to people. And I agree very much with what you say about just because someone does a bad thing doesn't make them a bad person. I have seen people, and it's a small percentage of people that I think are
pure arrovial and I've confronted them. But ninety nine percent of the people that you deal with, yeah, they've made a mistake, but they've got some goodness in them. And I think it was very interesting you say here without being dix and starting a new cycle of prejudice, disparity and offending. Policing works best when the public like the police, and the public support the police, and the police are representing them. So I think things like that are important messages to get across.
Yeah, totally. Who are to decide that this person should bear the brunt of my aggression just because they've done something wrong, right, Like, that's not your job. Your job is to a fact find for a court to make a decision. And so we can take all that emotion out of it. That's just us getting a motive going, you know, I'm right, You're I'm good, You're bad like Matilda, and and that all comes out in the interview room because we think that's what we're supposed to do, and
it's just like, that's not why we're here. We can parkle that and atally be okay, sitting in a room with someone that's done this and yeah they're not they're not the most evil person that ever walked the earth, and recognize them.
Well, good, good advice. We might wrap up here.
I want to thank you for the chat, and yeah, thanks for the service that you're given to the community over there in New Zealand, and a shout out to people that want to join the New Zealand place, because I really appreciate we're struggling, as I said, over here in Australia with people joining the police and I think exposing people to listening to someone like you, it sounds like you've had a great, great time in your career and you're still enjoying it.
Oh.
Absolutely, What an organization to be a part of, right, And what a privilege to actually be put in the shoes that you are as a cop and interact with the types of people that we do right, whereas you choose any other profession you don't get that. And I think the word privilege genuinely right. It gives you such a good perspective on life, and we need people, we
need good people from everywhere. Yeah, so yeah, I'm glad that our recruitment is going through a positive stage because that's exactly what we want.
Yeah, and you want the best of the best. Apply and then it's a job that you should be striving for and.
It is a privilege.
So it's always it puts a smile on my face speaking to a cop that enjoys doing their job and doing good work.
So thanks so much for coming on.
I catch gillers, no cheers, Gary, Absolute pleasure. Thanks very much, m HM.