Results of the 15th anniversary of the legalization of the polygraph in Russia and urgent tasks for the near future.
Kholodny Yu.I.,
Doctor of Law,
Candidate of Psychological Sciences,
Professor, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Moscow
Proceedings of the scientific and practical
conference «Current status and development prospects of the instrumental
method»lie detection» in the interests of state and public safety in Moscow»
For those who have linked their professional lives with the polygraph, this year is an anniversary: in the spring of 1993, the use of the polygraph in law enforcement practice in Russia was legalized.
Currently, the country is seeing an active growth in the applied use of polygraph surveys (PUS), and a clear indication of this is the third conference in the last three months.
Over the past years, Russian polygraph examiners have achieved significant success in the practical application of the polygraph in the country through joint efforts.
We will only dwell on those of them that, from my point of view, are the most important.
1. Our most important achievement is that the polygraph has become firmly established in public practice in Russia.
In particular, the OIP is actively used in their work by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the SVR, the FSIN and the FSNK.
The introduction of the polygraph into the activities of the Federal Customs Service, the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation and other federal agencies has begun.
Unfortunately, there are no reliable statistics on the volume of polygraph use in the country.
However, it can be stated that, based on the most approximate estimates, Russian government agencies conduct at least 40,000 polygraph tests for various purposes annually.
Private companies and firms use polygraph tests even more actively, ahead of the public sector.
Taken together, this allows us to assume that approximately 100,000 polygraph tests are conducted in the country annually.
Such estimates provide grounds to assert that Russia is among the top five countries using the polygraph, second only to the United States and, apparently, continental China.
2.Over the past 15 years, polygraph tests have ceased to be a metropolitan exotica, which was used by one or two dozen people. Again, without having precise statistics, one can assume that at present there are at least 250 specialists working in the civil service and about the same number (or even more) in the private sector.
Of the several hundred Russian specialists working with the polygraph, barely 5% received training in foreign schools. This indicates that the country has developed a domestic system for training specialists in this field, and in terms of the number of polygraph examiners, Russia is apparently also among the top five countries in the world that are leaders in this field.
In passing, it should be noted that domestic polygraph examiners contributed to the polygraph becoming a common practice in a number of CIS countries.
In particular, Russian specialists trained the first polygraph examiners in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
3.The next obvious achievement is that Russian specialists are provided with domestically produced computer polygraphs. Russia is one of five countries that produce this class of hardware and software. In this area, six commercial companies operate in the country, producing more than a dozen different models of computer polygraphs. (For comparison, three American and one Canadian company operate on the North American continent, producing 6-7 models of computer polygraphs.)
It should be especially emphasized that the best models of domestic polygraphs are not inferior in their tactical and technical capabilities to the latest models of overseas devices of the same class, and in some characteristics, Russian models are superior to foreign ones.
In Russia, there is a promising trend in the production of research complexes that, in addition to recording the physiological processes traditional for polygraphs, analyze the handwriting of the person being examined and his speech.
4. Over the past years, the OIP has ceased to be an unconventional method of an incomprehensible nature, the admissibility of which in the detection and investigation of crimes was disputed by a number of legal experts and criminologists.
As a result of scientific research conducted at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries in the field of forensic science, the OIP has taken a worthy place in the system of methods and means of this applied science.
And, what is especially significant, this year forensic diagnostic studies using a polygraph have been included for the first time in a university textbook on forensic science1 as an independent chapter in the section «Forensic technology».
5.Advances in the development of forensic foundations for the psychophysiological method of «lie detection» have led to the results obtained using a polygraph being considered by courts of various instances as evidence, and the IIPs themselves have been carried out in the form of forensic psychophysiological examination (SPPE).
Although the admissibility and technology of using a polygraph in procedural conditions is currently one of the most controversial issues, one important detail should be noted.
The US judicial practice came to the necessity of accepting the results obtained with the help of a polygraph as evidence only in the early 1990s, i.e. 70 years after the introduction of the polygraph into American police practice.
We reached this level at the very beginning of the 21st century, i.e. only 8-9 years after the legalization of the polygraph in Russia.
6.Finally, another important achievement is the development of the draft Federal Law «On the Use of the Polygraph», in the discussion and preparation of which scientists and specialists from 11 federal agencies of Russia took part.
This work was carried out by a special working group under the State Duma Committee on Security. The bill was prepared in the fall of 2007, and there is reason to believe that it will be submitted to the legislator for consideration in the near future.
For comparison, it should be noted that the US Congress first drew attention to the polygraph 10 years after the start of using this device in the country.
Then it took the US Congress another 25 years to pass a special law on the use of the polygraph in the US in 1988.
With only 15 years of legitimate use of the polygraph, we in Russia have already reached the level of a similar bill.
Let's hope that the Russian legislator will be more active than the American one, and it will not take a quarter of a century to pass a law on the polygraph.
However, while noting our achievements, it is also necessary to see our problems and shortcomings in our work.
The conferences held this fall in Moscow and Sochi provided an opportunity for those working in the field of OIP theory and practice to speak.
An analysis of the materials of these conferences clearly showed the current issues of the current period of polygraph development in Russia that concern many specialists and scientists.
Such issues are:
1) improvement of methodological means of polygraph testing;
2) computer polygraphs and their certification;
3) processing and evaluation of data recorded using a polygraph;
4) the problem of forensic psychophysiological examination;
5) technology of training and advanced training of polygraph examiners;
6) relevance of adopting a federal law regulating the use of a polygraph in RUSSIA.
The above questions are very important, and each of them deserves separate careful study and discussion; however, this list is far from complete.
Therefore, due to the limited scope of this article, we will consider only three questions that are of decisive importance for the further successful development and dissemination of the polygraph in Russia.
The most important tactical question is the question of training polygraph examiners.
It is generally accepted that the success of the applied application of a polygraph depends 90% on the training of the specialist who works with this device.
The emergence and development of computer polygraphs, the fascination with computer data processing programs led to the fact that the requirements for the training of polygraph examiners began to recede into the background.
In the 90s, this fascination led to the fact that some «polygraph experts» began to assert: the main task of a polygraph examiner is to connect the person being tested to the device and read him the questions.
And the polygraph will do the rest.
Having founded a polygraph examiner training school at the Institute of Criminalistics of the FSB of Russia in 1996 and having worked in this field for more than 10 years, I can state that the work of a polygraph examiner requires specialization.
Until recently, there were two of them — personnel polygraph examiners working in the field of personnel selection, and operational polygraph examiners meeting the needs of operational, operational-search and investigative practice.
It is easier to TRAIN personnel polygraph examiners from specialists of professional selection departments: these are people with basic education as psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, etc., and their training takes 450-500 academic hours.
For training as operational polygraph examiners, people are selected from among operational employees who have shown interest in mastering the OIP method, and personnel polygraph examiners who have shown interest and inclination for operational investigative work.
The training of this category of polygraph examiners takes at least 1,100 hours.
The emergence of forensic psychophysiological examination requires that the operational polygraph examiner be given an additional amount of knowledge in the field of forensic examination and the use of the polygraph in procedural conditions.
As a consequence of this, there is a need to form a new specialization — a polygraph examiner with the right to perform SPFE.
It is known that it is possible to train a young polygraph specialist in about a year. This technology is implemented in Russia in several schools, where the curriculum is implemented in the amount of 500-550 hours.
The acute shortage of polygraph examiners in Russia in general and highly qualified ones in particular leads to the fact that we constantly see the desire of individual managers and specialists of state and commercial structures to speed up the process of such training.
However, it has long been known that in reality a polygraph examiner “matures to the required condition” in about the third to fifth year of his work.
During this time, the “weak” leave the profession, the “strong” remain, and it is practically impossible to speed up this process.
In this regard, the emergence of accelerated programs for training polygraph examiners in the country is of concern.
For example, it is declared that it is possible to prepare a forensic expert to perform SPFE from any person with a higher education in 560 hours.
An even more alarming situation has developed in some commercial schools, where accelerated training of polygraph examiners sometimes exceeds all expectations and takes on an anecdotal character.
In particular, one can find offers when a company undertakes to train a «specialist» in 180 hours or even less than that, including via the Internet, with the cost of training being 50,000-60,000 rubles.
If we evaluate the cost of the educational process, it turns out that such obviously flawed express training costs 30-50% more per hour of training than in a school that provides training in the amount of 450-500 hours.
Unfortunately, it should be recognized that the unacceptably low quality of training of polygraph examiners in some schools is well known: in particular, a colleague from Kazakhstan noted that «the most alarming thing is the appearance in the Republic of polygraph examiners who have completed two-week training courses in Russia.
It is not difficult to imagine the level of their training.»2
The second question, which needs to be addressed — this is the use of the IIP in procedural practice.
Often this question comes down to the possibility or impossibility of performing the IIP in the form of SPFE.
Firstly, when considering the use of the IIP in solving and investigating crimes, it is necessary to understand whether it is always necessary to give the result obtained with the help of a polygraph the status of evidence.
Secondly, the criminal procedure law allows several options for presenting the results obtained with the help of a polygraph as evidence in a case, and the implementation of the SPFE is only one of these options.
Finally, thirdly, the implementation of the IIP in the form of the SPFE does not contradict the Federal Law «On state forensic activity in the Russian Federation».
V.A. Semenov presented his point of view on this issue, criticizing the “order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia dated January 31, 2008, according to which polygraph specialists are ordered to exclude the practice of conducting forensic psychophysiological examinations and not to allow them to violate the normative legal acts governing this area of official activity.”
Speaking from the position of forensic science, this scientist provides weighty arguments with which it is difficult to disagree.
At the same time, given the current situation in the country in the area of training polygraph examiners, the position of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs on this issue can hardly be considered erroneous. Quite the contrary.
The adopted order should be recognized as correct — at least as a temporary measure — until some state expert institution develops and puts at the service of the expert community a valid methodology for performing SPFE.
What is now carried out with the help of a polygraph and is called SPFE, in most cases is not an examination.
Moreover, polygraph examiners who undertake such examinations do not even suspect that the technologies of polygraph testing in the interests of the OPR and when performing SPFE are significantly different, and not every computer polygraph is suitable for conducting SPFE.
There are frequent cases when, during the investigation of serious and especially serious crimes, such a «polygraph specialist», who does not have the necessary knowledge, daringly conducts the SPFE in 2-2.5 hours, including a twenty-minute pre-test interview.
The incompetence of polygraph examiners in performing the SPFE has already led to cases of courts refusing to accept the results of such examinations as evidence.
The critical comments expressed should not be considered as an attempt to close the road to the SPFE in practice.
On the contrary.
It is necessary to continue work on the scientific substantiation of the technology for performing IIP in the form of the SPFE.
Time will tell how the results obtained with the help of a polygraph will be used by procedural practice in the future.
However, having accepted for execution the strict requirements dictated by the criminal procedure law and forensic activity, those who work in the field of theory and practice of SPFE will be forced to improve the technology of the OIP and determine in which investigative situations, for which classes of cases the examination is justified and optimal.
Finally, the most important third issue, strategic — this is the issue of adopting the Federal Law «On the Use of the Polygraph».
The adoption of such a law is urgently needed for government agencies: it would stimulate lawmaking activity in federal departments, where legal regulation of the use of the OIP in the field of personnel work and operational-investigative practice clearly lags behind the requirements of today.
Such a law is even more necessary for the non-governmental sphere, where legal regulation of the use of OIP, indirectly falling under the effect of labor legislation, is in dire need of detailed regulation: its absence has already led to the abuse of the polygraph and, as a consequence, the violation of the rights of Russian citizens.
The Federal Law «On the Use of the Polygraph» would establish uniform standards for the use of the polygraph in all spheres of society (in particular, the procedure and system for training polygraph examiners), and many of the shortcomings and absurdities in the use of the IIP, observed at present and well known to polygraph examiners, would lose their basis for existence.
Literature.
1 Forensic Science. Textbook/edited by prof. A.F. Volynsky and V.P. Lavrov. Moscow: UNITY-DANA, 2008. Pp. 302-217.
2 Kozhemseitov S. N. Problems and Achievements of the Use of the Polygraph in the Republic of Kazakhstan //Actual Problems of Special Psychophysiological Research and Prospects for Their Use in the Fight Against Crime: Proceedings of the VII International Scientific and Practical Conference. Krasnodar: KubSTU Publishing House, 2006. Page 88.
3 Semenov V.A. Use of a Polygraph in the Production of Individual Investigative Actions //Current Issues of Special Psychophysiological Research and Prospects for Their Use in the Fight Against Crime: Proceedings of the IX International Scientific and Practical Conference. Krasnodar: KubSTU Publishing House, 2006. Page 111.