Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector

by Amit Katwala

But perhaps Vollmer’s biggest innovation was his compassion. If you were picked up for drunkenness, you would be brought in to sleep it off and released the next morning without charge. Anyone could come in and ask for a night’s lodgings, and they’d be given two clean blankets, a shower, and a “good ham-and-egg breakfast” in the morning. “The chief was a humanitarian,” said one of his officers. Vollmer loved children, although he was sterile and couldn’t have any of his own. He kept a bowl of sweets on his desk for young visitors, who called him “Uncle Gus.” Despite grumbling from some of the older officers, he reserved room in the police department for a Children’s Room, which acted as an informal youth club that kept troubled kids off the streets. It was filled with toys, animals, and the sound of music—it was not uncommon to hear yodeling or the twang of a ukulele. “Show them that the law is their friend and not their enemy” was Vollmer’s frequent refrain. He abhorred physical violence on the part of his officers, and the beatings that were routinely handed out to noncompliant suspects during interrogations (although early in his career he did dole out the occasional spanking and once “mildly” whipped three youths for stealing). Vollmer’s overwhelming emphasis was on prevention, not punishment. “I’m not judging you on arrests,” he would tell new recruits. “I’m judging you on how many people you keep from doing something wrong.”

A lie detector test was inherently stressful—being asked about a theft or a murder weapon could cause an emotional response whether you were guilty or not.

Larson had discovered during his experiments that short, basic queries were the best, and the question he had written down for Taylor could not have been more simple: “Do you love me?” “No,” she said quickly—but Larson didn’t need a machine to tell that she was lying. For a moment, she looked across at the rookie detective, his eyes fixed on hers. Then her gaze flicked over to the rolling drums of the apparatus and the black paper that had opened a window to her heart. “The wings of the ‘lie detector’ trembled, fluttered, waved a frantic SOS,” wrote The Examiner—retelling the story

Freakin love this

sixteen months later, on the day of Larson and Taylor’s wedding.

But the voices of scientific alarm have been drowned out and disregarded. And today, a new wave of lie detection technologies are coming to market, powered by brain scans and artificial intelligence.

If the murder weapon was a baseball bat, for instance, the suspect could be presented with the words “baseball bat” along with “lead pipe,” “candlestick” and “spanner.” “When we present those items on the screen, the individual who knows what the murder weapon was, his brain will say “Aha” when that comes up,” Farwell explained. “He’ll notice it.”

Far from learning the lessons from the dark history of the polygraph, we’re replacing the subjective scoring of a human examiner with something that might be even worse—the black box of an algorithm. “We don’t know how it works,” O’Shea said of Silent Talker. “The AI system learned how to do it by itself.”

“This involuntary response that occurs in the eyes is something that you can’t control; in fact, you can’t even feel that it’s happening,” said the company’s president and CEO, Todd Mickelsen.

History serves as a warning.