Thread by @bykenarmstrong

A lot of TV dramas portray police as the most skeptical people around. They’re hard-bitten, probing, difficult to win over.
But the opposite is often true. Police can be remarkably uncritical.
Case in point: Scientific Content Analysis.
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2/ It’s called SCAN, for short. SCAN popped up in a case we were investigating with @SBTribune, a local reporting partner. A detective in a murder case used SCAN to conclude one suspect was truthful, another deceptive.
We had never heard of SCAN. We wanted to know more about it.

@SBTribune 3/ Police use SCAN on written statements, looking for signs of deception. Among other things, they analyze pronouns used, details skipped over, and changes in vocabulary — say, writing “kids” in one place and “children” in another.

@SBTribune 4/ They’re taught to mark up a person’s words, circling pronouns and color-coding everything from “unimportant information” to “missing information.”
Here’s a real-life sample, from an investigation conducted by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

@SBTribune 5/ Law enforcement agencies around the world, from Australia to the Netherlands to Singapore, use SCAN to help establish an investigation’s direction, to help pick suspects to focus on.
But does SCAN work?

@SBTribune 6/ “Scientific” may be in SCAN’s name, but, in the words of 4 scholars in a 2016 study, SCAN has “no empirical support” — meaning, there’s no reliable science behind it.
These researchers found that in separating fact from fiction, SCAN was about as effective as flipping a coin.

@SBTribune 7/ SCAN was created by a man named Avinoam Sapir. His company, the Laboratory for Scientific Interrogation, sells SCAN products, including sample analyses.
We bought some.

@SBTribune 8/ 1st up, the Mueller Report:
Its first page says the FBI opened an investigation “into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government…”
“Please note,” Sapir writes: “The report says, ‘whether…’ and not ‘whether or not…’”

@SBTribune 9/ “By the omission of ‘or not’ it seems that the FBI was already concentrating on only one option,” Sapir writes.
To grammarians, the use of “or not” in that sentence would be redundant and therefore poor writing.
To Sapir, the words’ absence reveals intent.

@SBTribune 10/ Next up, former FBI director James Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
Sapir counts 14 instances in the 290-page book in which Comey describes the opening or closing of a door, be it to a garage, office or minivan.

@SBTribune 11/ “This activity when it enters an ‘open statement’ is correlated very strongly to child abuse in the speaker’s past,” Sapir writes. “This is due to the fact that child abuse starts when the door opens and it ends when the door is closed.”

@SBTribune 12/ Comey sometimes refers to former congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer as a “laptop.” Other times he calls the computer a “computer.” “This is ‘unjustified change of language’ indicating that deception might be present…,” Sapir writes.

@SBTribune 13/ We asked Comey about SCAN and this analysis (for which we paid $5). This is what he emailed back:

@SBTribune 14/ James Comey: “No comment. Never heard of the alleged tool. (And by using the word ‘never’ in conjunction with the word ‘heard,’ I mean only ‘never heard’ and not to suggest childhood trauma. Yikes.) I’m sorry about your five bucks.”

@SBTribune 15/ Lastly, Anita Hill.
On a local-access TV show, Sapir analyzed Hill’s Senate testimony in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
Hill said: “I had a normal social life with other men outside of the office.”

@SBTribune 16/ “Let’s take this sentence,” Sapir told an interviewer. “There is only a certain group in society that can label themselves as normal. Only the people who were labeled abnormal before.”
“Oh, oh my goodness,” the interviewer said.

@SBTribune 17/ Now that you’ve seen these examples, would you want detectives using SCAN on you?
propublica.org/article/why-ar…

@SBTribune 18/ Comey may have not heard of SCAN, but SCAN is used — widely.
A task force comprising the FBI, CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense wrote in a 2016 report that SCAN “is widely employed in spite of a lack of supporting research.”

@SBTribune 19/ This same report identified three specific agencies that use SCAN: the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army military intelligence, which falls under the Department of Defense.
In other words, the very agencies that cite SCAN’s lack of scientific support.

@SBTribune 20/ We asked to interview Sapir, SCAN’s creator. Here’s what we heard back from his company:

@SBTribune 21/ Sapir’s company lists more than 400 agencies (local, state, federal) in the U.S. that have received training in SCAN.
Through public-records requests, we obtained documents from 40.

@SBTribune 22/ When it comes to enthusiasm for SCAN, it would be hard to top the Texas Rangers, one of the country’s most celebrated law enforcement agencies. (Think Chuck Norris in the television drama, “Walker, Texas Ranger.”)

@SBTribune 23/ In 2017, Texas paid for 26 Rangers to get SCAN training.
This year, there were two more waves. Seven Rangers received the training in Austin. A week later, 10 more attended the course in Kingsville. Here’s what they said when I asked them about it:

@SBTribune 24/ The course came recommended by a top Ranger who is now the agency’s No. 2.
In an email to other Rangers, he said he had received the training himself. He wrote of Sapir, “He is a true master at detecting deception, and his technique is way better than a polygraph.”

@SBTribune 25/ In addition to Scientific Content Analysis, @ProPublica has written about other dubious crime-solving tools, including:
Bloodstain-pattern analysis: bit.ly/2OcJXzr
Photo analysis: bit.ly/2OaLHce

@SBTribune @propublica 26/ For alerts on whatever @ProPublica investigation comes next, sign up for our newsletter: go.propublica.org/bigstory-social