Authors: Ken Alder
Yet Graham was hardly the naive test subject Larson portrayed in his scientific write-up. Even on her first exam—the original encounter between a human subject and the modern deception machine—Graham had apparently taken medication in advance to mask her physiological reactions. Several decades would pass before psychologists—who ought to have known better—would realize they could not treat their objects of study as other scientists do, as brute phenomena of nature. When Einstein inscribed above his fireplace the motto, "Nature’s God is subtle, but He is not malicious," he acknowledged as a corollary the possibility that people might be malicious, if also sometimes subtle. Yet even polygraph operators—who surely knew better—seemed not to consider the myriad ways their subjects came forearmed. Countermeasures to lie detection are as old as lie detection itself.
All through 1921, long after Graham had returned to Kansas, the petty thefts continued in the College Hall residence. In retrospect, Larson wondered whether some of the young women had conspired to distract him during the exam. He bemoaned the way his investigation had been hurried. He should have been allowed to test the chambermaids, he said, not to mention the housemother and her family. It would become a familiar regret; get hold of a lie detector, and who knew whom you could trust?
In a certain sense, a large part of the criminalist’s work is nothing more than a battle against lies. He has to discover the truth and must fight the opposite….Utterly to vanquish the lie, particularly in our work, is of course, impossible, and to describe its nature exhaustively is to write the natural history of mankind.
—HANS GROSS,
CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY,
1898
BERKELEY TODAY STILL CONJURES UP IMAGES FROM THE 1960s,
when protesters smeared the town’s police officers as "pigs." Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, Berkeley was world-famous as the seedbed for a new kind of police officer: technologically sophisticated, respectful of the law, and closely allied to social work. This reputation was the legacy of Chief August Vollmer, often considered "the most significant individual in the annals of American law enforcement." By 1920 he was the nation’s most famous cop, and Berkeley was his experimental proving ground. The lie detector was an integral part of Vollmer’s program to regenerate the morality of both the police and Berkeley.
There was no limit to Larson’s admiration for Vollmer. To say that Vollmer was the father he would have wanted is to reduce to a pop-psychological commonplace what Larson expressed in far loftier terms. He dedicated his first book to "the genius and altruism of Chief August Vollmer, humanitarian, scientist and criminologist." Vollmer, a man who never passed the sixth grade, replied with characteristic verve: "First of all I am not a humanitarian, I’m a ‘cop.’ Secondly, I am not a scientist, I am a good guesser. And thirdly, I am not a criminologist because a criminologist has recently been defined as one who studies crime and knows nothing about it."
August Vollmer knew something about crime. He was born in New Orleans in 1876 to German immigrants. His father died when he was eight, and his mother settled in Berkeley in 1891, when Vollmer was fifteen. He grew to be a tall young man with swimmer’s shoulders and a long face with pale lips and clear gray eyes. He could appear stern and unyielding, but he was a keen observer of human foibles and comfortable with people from all walks of life. Everyone wanted to please him.
When he was twenty-one Vollmer sold his feed store and volunteered for the Spanish-American War, during which he served in the military police and ran river patrols against Philippine guerrilla groups, adapting his tactics and cutting deals with locals. By his own account it was the formative experience of his life. On his return to Berkeley he worked as a letter carrier until 1905, when Friend W. Robinson, publisher of the
Berkeley Gazette
(and future governor of California), recruited him to run for town marshal. According to the paper, not only did Vollmer possess the requisite "mental acuity and sagacity"; he had the "physical strength to cope with any criminal."
Vollmer was swept into office in a three-to-one landslide, along with a slate of other Republican "good government" candidates. Twenty-nine years old, without formal experience in law enforcement, he relied on his own rigorous integrity, judgment of character, and military-minded ability to match means to ends. Immediately he persuaded the city board of trustees to replace the two part-time deputies with six full-time policemen. It was the start of something extraordinary.
Berkeley has always been two towns joined at the hip. First came the commercial district of warehouses, working-class housing, and rough saloons clustered along the Bayshore. Soon after, the trustees of a small college in Oakland created a campus at the base of the Contra Costa hills, a public university to outshine the universities back east, partially funded by selling panoramic lots to middle-class householders. The prospect through the Golden Gate led one trustee to recall the line of Bishop Berkeley: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." Thus did Berkeley, famous for the proposition that objects exist only in the mind of God, give his name to what its founders hoped would be the "Athens of the Pacific." By the early twentieth century, the town of Berkeley was approaching its Athenian promise, without fully disengaging from its hard-luck neighbors.
Vollmer’s first move as marshal was to clean out the Chinese gambling dens. His logic was strategic; gamblers’ payoffs threatened to corrupt town politics. In his second year in office, the San Francisco earthquake struck. Vollmer organized an auxiliary force of 1,000 men (nearly every adult male in Berkeley) to maintain order among tens of thousands of refugees. He was reelected by an even larger majority. Then in 1909 he was appointed police chief, a post he held for the next twenty-three years, with only brief leaves of absence to transplant his methods to other cities. During those decades he introduced the various features of the "Berkeley system," the core tenets of American professional policing.
Though he was a workaday police chief in a university town rather than a social theoretician, Vollmer had a well-thought-out view of the police as guardians of democracy. He sought a middle ground between the narrow Anglo-Saxon view of the police as crime-fighters and the European continental view of the police as regulators of social life. Though he would have preferred his men to focus on property crime and personal violence, Vollmer came to recognize that it was more efficient to prevent crime, even if this meant inserting the police into the community’s messy life. The challenge was that most working-class Americans feared the police for their brutality, while the well-to-do considered them fools or knaves.
Vollmer’s lifelong goal was to dispel this blend of fear and contempt by raising the social, intellectual, and moral stature of police officers until they got the respect they deserved. This explains Vollmer’s embrace of scientific police work, his vaunted program of professionalization, and his rejection of police violence, corruption, and favoritism. It also meant doing something about America’s scandalous crime rate.
In the early twentieth century the rate of violent crime was four to ten times greater in America than Europe. Vollmer insisted that the police could not be blamed for this, yet he was determined to do better. The main obstacle was "politics," by which he meant the spoils system of the municipal machine: the way the police were hired, fired, or promoted on the basis of pull and patronage rather than competence. This explained why the police enforced the law violently and selectively; it gave them leverage to extract bribes and favors. Thomas Byrnes, New York’s notorious cop, is said to have coined the term "third degree"—perhaps a pun on his name—for his violent interrogations; and his colleague Captain Alexander Williams once boasted that there was more law in the end of policeman’s nightstick than in all the decisions of the Supreme Court.
Vollmer agreed that police officers had to exercise discretion; he just wanted them to enforce the law fairly and efficiently. Building on the reforms of Progressives like New York’s police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, Vollmer urged a managerial revolution in police work, one analogous to the revolution in "scientific management" then transforming American business. This included the centralization of command and communication, specialization of tasks, and the deployment of scientific know-how. In 1906 Vollmer was the first to outfit his entire force with bicycles; and in later years he was the first to outfit it with squad cars, although, oddly, Vollmer himself never learned to drive. In 1907, he installed the nation’s first citywide network of signals, enabling a dispatcher to contact a police officer anywhere in town; and in later years he installed its first twoway radio system. He also created his own filing system to organize crimes by fingerprints and handwriting, cross-referenced with his own classification system based on the criminal’s modus operandi, and from these he compiled statistics to map the intensity of crime and assess which police methods best reduced it. His identification system became the model for California, and then for the nation as a whole under the aegis of J. Edgar Hoover, who applied many of Vollmer’s methods.
These technical innovations, which made Vollmer the darling of the press, ought not to obscure his drive to create a new kind of police officer. Unsatisfied with the level of police training, he established an in-house police school in 1908, with members of the university faculty teaching courses on evidence law, forensic methods, crime-scene photography, and medicine. In 1916, he hired a chemist from the pharmacy school as a full-time criminologist. As for his own men, he announced that he would hire and promote officers solely on the basis of merit. In 1919 he began to recruit college graduates, vetting applicants with the intelligence tests developed during World War I, along with a battery of psychiatric exams.
Only this new kind of officer, Vollmer believed, would be able to balance proactive policing against the danger of becoming the enforcer of some unobtainable ideal. Vollmer himself always took a paternal interest in doings throughout the city. He encouraged citizens to turn to him or his officers for help with domestic disputes and unruly teenagers. One disciple recalled Vollmer telling recruits, in somewhat contradictory fashion: "You’re not to judge people; you’re just to report what they’re doing wrong. Better still, you can prevent people from doing wrong. That’s the mission of a policeman."
Around 1920, in a provocative address to his fellow police chiefs entitled "The Policeman as Social Worker," he turned his attention to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Vollmer had hired the region’s first female police officer, a woman with training in psychology, to work with local schools to identify potential delinquents. On a map in his office, each problem child in town was represented by a color-coded pin, so that the Chief could track these children’s development. Fourteen years later 90 percent of the "problem" children had been placed in institutions of one sort or another. In the noisy debate then raging over the root causes of crime—was it the fault of the individual, or due to biological and social forces?—Vollmer finessed the issue by considering crime a disease and suggesting that the solution was a comprehensive effort to improve the nation’s moral hygiene.
It helped that Vollmer was himself neither a moralist nor a hypocrite. Like many policemen, Vollmer delighted in gossip. He made no secret of being a ladies’ man. His first wife was an opera singer, who apparently grew tired of his philandering ways. He thought Prohibition a disastrous diversion of police resources and handled the town’s liquor laws with tolerance. He even frequented speakeasies. He played the guitar and enjoyed practical jokes, especially if they exposed pseudoscientific pretension. Once Vollmer invited a phrenologist to demonstrate his ability to read people’s characters from the shape of their skull, then planted one of his own ace detectives, a chemistry graduate, in a jail cell for the expert to assess. The phrenologist pronounced the man a confirmed criminal.
It helped too that Vollmer achieved results. His statistical surveys not only helped determine which methods best helped fight crime, but also convinced the stingy city council of his success. On his watch burglary rates declined by 50 percent even as Berkeley’s population increased, the city employing half as many cops as were typical in other towns its size. In later years he led the town’s efforts to collect every citizen’s fingerprints—voluntarily—as the way to ensure a well-policed community.
As he approached middle age Vollmer maintained his trim bearing, high forehead, hawklike nose, and creased laugh lines. Visitors invariably commented on his clear gray eyes. They were less windows into his soul than instruments of discovery. William Dean, one of the first "college cops," and later a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, compared Vollmer to generals George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur in that respect. "All three had the capacity to look through you and you’d think they knew exactly what you were thinking. You didn’t feel uncomfortable but you felt you’d better not try to tell anything but the whole truth when you spoke to them." Some people speculated that Vollmer cultivated this piercing gaze because he had some secret of his own to hide. If so, no one ever learned what it was.
Central to Vollmer’s strategy for ensuring respect for the law was making his police themselves law-abiding. For Vollmer, this meant treating citizens with the presumption of innocence and disavowing those coercive police interrogations known as the "third degree." His officers left political radicals alone. Vollmer personally denounced the death penalty as ineffective. And he hired Walter Gordon, the first black football player at the University of California, who in later years, as governor of the Virgin Islands, recalled Vollmer’s contempt for racism and insistence that his officers use persuasion instead of physical force. Another disciple recalled Vollmer’s telling his officers never to "strike any person, particularly a prisoner, except in extreme self-defense; and then he said, if you ever do, you have just resigned." To some extent, this "by the books" image was a myth cultivated by his disciples. In practice, Vollmer’s paternalist, preemptive approach to police work meant that he sometimes took a more direct hand in resolving conflicts. In his first year on the job, the Chief "mildly" whipped three youths for stealing $75 from a quarryman. And though he forbade violence, he never renounced the use of psychological pressure to extract information. Today, we associate this approach to policing with the rulings of the Warren Supreme Court of the 1960s. This is no accident. Earl Warren began his career in the 1920s as a district attorney in Alameda County (which encompasses Berkeley), and his approach owes much to the lessons he learned while working alongside August Vollmer.
No wonder Vollmer was enthusiastic about the College Hall case. Larson’s technique seemed to extract information from suspects without tempting his cops to resort to brutality. It also promised new insights into the criminal mind and—who knew?—perhaps even its cure.
Before he OK’d the instrument for general use in Berkeley, Vollmer asked Larson to prepare a personal demonstration. When he arrived at Larson’s lab, however, he immediately turned the tables, making Larson strap
himself
into the machine. At that instant, Larson recalled, he anticipated the exact topic of Vollmer’s interrogation. Two weeks earlier, the rookie had been off his beat, sharing a malted milk, when a hardware store had been robbed—and the Chief, who knew everything that happened in Berkeley, had undoubtedly been informed. So by the time the anticipated question came—"Were you off your beat the night of the Sunset Hardware Store burglary?"—Larson didn’t even have to answer; his body’s response was so dramatic that "the needles went off the drum." At which point, Jack Fisher, the old-time cop, slammed his star on the table and offered to resign rather than go on "that Goddam thing." "I don’t need the machine for you," laughed the Chief. That December the Berkeley city council approved the construction of a new device. For the next two years Vollmer gave Larson carte blanche to try his technique on hundreds of cases in Berkeley. It was the chance Larson had been waiting for.