Tell us about your background as a police detective.
My background is pretty simple; I’m a council estate kid who left school aged 16. I joined the army, then left the army at 22 to join the police and left the police in 2014. Somewhere on that journey, around the early 1990s, I became a detective. Then I got involved in serious crime around 1996 and then by 2002, was working with a major investigation team, which mainly involved murder investigations.
Around that time in Manchester, there was a lot of gang violence and shootings. Around this time many police forces police forces formed units called major incident teams. You have seen them on TV: teams of detectives and then within that team of detectives, you would have specialists. The way it works is – imagine a pyramid. It’s led by a Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) usually a Detective Superintendent or Detective Chief Inspector. Then you have an office team that work a machine called HOLMES, and the police are really imaginative, it stands for Home Office Large Major Enquiry System.
That came around due to the Peter Sutcliffe inquiry. So you have a huge computer now that takes a whole team of people to drive and there’s a paper flow that goes through our system. A murder would happen and the senior investigating officer would call out their advisers – me being one of them.
So how does the life of a police detective now translate to the gambling industry?
People are losing faith in the police. As an ex-police officer, I’m disappointed, but that’s a fact. So there is more and more now being put on the employer to do their own in-house investigations. In London, there’s a big movement of private prosecution. Private prosecutions, in-house prosecution, in-house investigations are active, because the police are just not doing it anymore. So in-house, companies have invested a lot into investigators. And what we do is train those in-house investigators because they’ve got to get better at it and they can no longer rely on the police.
The difficult thing with these investigations is that, when you look at gambling and compliance investigations, it tends to attract the investigators who spent a lot of time working on fraud. So they’re very good on spreadsheets and documents, but not brilliant when it comes to speaking to people… or not brilliant with Strategic or Tactical Use of Evidence.
If I’ve got evidence now and I’ve got to interview somebody, how do I best use this? If I give you everything up front and say go away and think about it, you’re going to have created a narrative. And that simply won’t work. The police introduced a model of interviewing in 1992 called PEACE (Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account Clarification and Challenge, Closure then Evaluation). However some police officers got fixated on using PEACE as a rigid model, and haven’t adapted to new types of evidence available to investigators today, and learned how to use it as a framework.
When you look at gambling and compliance investigations, it tends to attract the investigators who spent a lot of time working on fraud. So they’re very good on spreadsheets and documents, but not brilliant when it comes to speaking to people…
Is this more important when interviewing those trained in giving very specific answers, like CEOs?
It’s more about bias, basically investigative bias. So I’m the investigator and I’ve gathered all the material from the banks and wherever else. For example, in a casino, I might look at all the memberships and then look at the key codes. Who’s been to the cage and how many times? It’s all in black and white, especially when I’ve got the spreadsheets in front of me.
When I’m looking at those spreadsheets, the biggest mistake I can make is anticipating that I know what’s happened. And the longer you’ve been an investigator, the harder it is to avoid, because you’ve probably seen something similar before. Sure, you can spend a hell of a lot of time gathering all the evidence, but if you don’t use it correctly or you don’t have a mind for an alternate hypothesis, it can all go wrong.
So a poor interviewer would ask many closed questions, rather than saying, ‘Tell me about your casino,’ shutting up and letting them talk. An investigation is an investigation in any setting… it is more like a chassis. Whatever industry you drop in, that is still an investigation.
So whether that’s in higher education, HR, law or even health and safety, it’s still the same process. Your job as the investigator is to go in there with an open mind and gather information that either supports or contradicts. We learned pretty quickly about our internal operations, and the same problems occurred in internal audits. Assumptions were being made and investigations were not being people-focused; the right questions were not asked, the difficult questions were not asked. Part of the skill of investigation is planning. People don’t do that very well. A lot of our training focuses on planning.
Does it make for a stronger investigation if the same person who prepares the evidence also conducts the interview?
Yes, it should be the same person. In a major investigation, you might not get that, but you’ve got different standards. In a high-stakes investigation, where the outcome may be that someone loses their job the standard of proof doesn’t change but the quality of the investigation should be higher.
A good example is an investigation into a minor criminal offence would be scrutinised at the Magistrates Court. That investigation won’t be the platinum-standard like it would be if you were investigating a major crime which would be scrutinised at a Crown Court. The standard of proof is exactly the same, but the quality of the investigation will be higher.
What about when there is a public figure involved, or when the case has significant public interest?
Where people make the mistake, particularly in civil investigations, is they think the standard of proof suddenly becomes higher. It doesn’t. The standard of proof is: is it more likely than not? And there’s a whole host of different explanations. Some people say it’s 51 versus 49, but it’s not. It just has to be over 50% likelihood.
The amount of work that should go into the investigation to get to that point should be higher or lower, depending on what the potential outcome is. If somebody at work says you’ve been taking their sandwiches out of the fridge, you’re not expecting a three-month investigation. You’d expect a manager to quickly look at it, but if the manager feels it’s more likely than not you took the sandwiches, you’ll get some kind of reprimand.
But, if somebody said they woke up next to a colleague after a work function but can’t remember how, then the potential outcome is that person could get sacked. So the standards of investigation should be high, but the standard of proof is the same. You must look at the facts and see what they say. Do the facts add up to whatever the allegation is? That’s where the investigation bias has to be removed.
This can apply specifically in a gaming setting too?
Yes, let’s say you’re a casino manager but you’ve worked your way up to that position from a croupier. You’ll know what can happen on the tables because you’ve lived and breathed that. But when you’re taking a step away and you’re looking at investigating for potential fraud or straightforward theft, the hard bit is not projecting yourself in there. It’s good to have that background, but the hard bit is not thinking: ‘Oh, I know exactly what’s happening.’
You’ve got to remove more and take a really retrospective step back. That’s difficult to do. The more experienced of an investigator you are, the more difficult it becomes and the more you think ‘I’ve seen this before.’
What are some real-world applications of this that you’ve seen?
In some industries they call it surveillance. It’s electronic and you’re taking reactive steps rather than proactive steps. So let’s say you remove a file from a computer system and you know you shouldn’t. Well, that’ll flag somewhere. And by the time the compliance team will come in the next day, somebody will say: ‘Oh, X took a file home with them.’
Now, if I had a bunch of assumptions and closed questions, if you go into an investigation with a prescribed list of questions, you’re not going to give that person the opportunity to explain themselves and you’re going to be making assumptions.
It would be much better if I went into the interview and simply asked the person why they did what they did. They could explain that they didn’t intend to steal the document, they simply didn’t have enough time in the day to get the work done and wanted to email the work home to finish it off later. Now, rather than having the issue being staff stealing information, the problem is unfair working conditions etc.
Are there any issues you’ve come across when working specifically within gambling?
Often, you’re dealing with a very close-knit group of people. Let’s say you work in a casino, you all know each other. You socialise together. How hard is it for you to give me information about what’s going on? When you look at the research, most whistleblowers are what they call outliers, so they’re not really part of the gang. It’s easier to blow the whistle when you’re not right in the middle. Then the other problem is what happens if you’re too far in and you don’t want to be there. You might want to blow the whistle, but pretend you’ve done nothing wrong.
To get the information I need to investigate properly, I need to know how to assure people. So the dynamics of speaking to people are massively important. I’ve only got one chance for people to win their trust. And it’s got to work out – that’s on a sort of chemical basis in the brain.
Imagine you’re an employee. Now, I know in the workplace regulations, it will say in the in-house discipline codes that you’re expected to comply with the investigator’s requests. And if you don’t, you might get sacked. Yet you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…
So how do you overcome that?
From my perspective, it’s not just about finding out the facts. It’s about the bigger picture, not just a confession. It’s not about driving somebody to a confession and saying 'I’ve done a really good job.' If someone has confessed to stealing money and it may well be an innocent confession. The problem will continue, because you’ve got to identify the weakness of the system. So this is where my journey from police detective to where I am now: training internal audit, external audit, compliance, HR, and health and safety professionals.
You can actually learn a lot from health and safety because they are effectively not looking to blame one individual. They’re looking at the Swiss Cheese Model, looking at contributing factors like they’re slices of Swiss cheese with holes in. So the investigation focuses on how did all those slices align so that the little holes lined up and let this happen. So what I want to do at the end of an investigation is say be able to say okay, that person did or didn’t do it. However, this is the reason why and this is what you need to fix to stop it happening again. For many years private industry used the Reid technique. A company called Wicklander-Zulawski were training the Reid technique in the UK. Thankfully, the guys at Wicklander-Zulawski had a moment a few years ago and realised what they were doing was wrong. They turned away from the Reid technique and now deliver training based on the investigative interviewing model. Reid was all about getting a confession. Now, you should recognise the benefit of an early confession if it comes because it can shorten the process, but it shouldn’t be what the investigator sets off to do. I should leave the house thinking I will try to understand what happened. After all, the person who has commissioned me wants to find out what went wrong.
