Lie Detector
Beginning of Lie detector
For around centuries, individuals searched various approaches to exposing liars, looking for clues in the blushing cheeks, tricky eyes, twisting toes and all other body's outward signs. However, this finally reached its initiation in the 1920s, when a police officer with a PhD collaborated with an entrepreneurial secondary school student of Berkeley, California and asserted to have developed a machine that researched straightforwardly inside the human heart. In a couple of years, their machine altered police work, detained headlines, tackled mysterious murders and captivated the country. The concept of using a lie detector rose emerged in the middle period of the nineteenth century. Despite several chief technological progresses, the lie detector evolved lesser since the period of its conception. The lie detector operated under the suspicion that lies can be caught by some specific reckonable physiological variations, a hypothesis that was proposed more than 100 years prior. The detector that was used in 1920 was commonly known as Poly Graph, and it primarily measured respiratory and cardiovascular activities of the body. (Alder, 2007)
Later in the twentieth century, detection of lies adapted several scientific characteristics with the expansion of approaches that utilized trials of physiological reactions as sings of deceptions. However, the polygraph termed out to be the best one in this regard. This system, which depended on physiological estimations, was created at the start of 20th century, and ended up for many people in the U.S. law authorization and intelligence groups, the most esteemed system for finding out lawbreakers, criminals, spies, and saboteurs where immediate evidence was lacking. (Segrave, 2004)
August Vollmer
August Vollmer is famously acknowledged as the inventor of modern law enforcement approaches and was a noteworthy figure in the development of the advanced criminal justice agenda. He worked as a town masters for 4 years (from 1905-1909) and was later selected as Chief of Police in Berkeley in the year 1909. While performing his duty as Berkeley's head of the police department, Vollmer presented various ideas that changed police depart into what it is seen today. When August Vollmer came in this field, cops were known more for their corruption and brutality than their criminal catching and case-solving approaches. Vollmer, who just attained a sixth-grade training, banned corruption by banning gifts and grafts, and initiated a series of changes that are credited with changing policing into a respected profession. (Rennison, 2014)
Accomplishments of Vollmer
- He initiated a campaign of putting police officers on bicycles in order to eliminate their ego.
- He developed an inter-connected police reports and records structure which was done for the first time in United States.
- He insisted on using fiber, blood and soil experimentation to resolve criminal cases and was the first US Chief to do so. His discovery led to the development of may crime-solving laboratories in the state.
- He initiated the concept of radio communications among officers.
- He founded a police school to teach offers about law enforcement.
- He discovered lie detector machine to conclude investigations.
Reliability of Lie detector
After reviewing the second chapter of “The Polygraph and Lie Detection” by Stephen E. Fienberg, we have come to know that the forms of reliability used for detection of lies are test-retest reliability and inter-rates reliability. In the former one, a repetition of experiments is conducted using same approaches and the same subject in order to attain the same result by same examiners. However, in the later one, the same conclusion is drawn by different examiners for a given examination, conducted at a specific time on a specific subject.
Reliability across various examines is termed as another important aspect while conduction overall test reliability as every individual posses his/her own interpretation to a given questions. Furthermore, internal consistency is also considered to indicate deception (Fienberg pp. 30).
References
Alder, K. (2007). The lie detectors. New York: Free Press.
Stephen E. Fienberg. (2003). The Polygraph and Lie Detection. The National Academies Press
Rennison, C. M. (2014). Vollmer, August. The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Segrave, K. (2004). Lie detectors. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland.
