Is 911 Homicide Legitimate or Dangerous Pseudoscience?
You may not know this name but the bearer of it may have an impact on your life, if you or someone you know should have to make a 911 call concerning a death. He is Tracy Harpster.
Harpster is a retired police officer and the developer, along with Susan Adams a retired FBI agent with a PhD in Human Development, of a program that purports to suss out a murderer when someone calls 911. The program is called “9-1-1 Homicide – Is the Caller the Killer?” and is based on their book, available on Amazon and other places, Analyzing 911 Homicide Calls: Practical Aspects of Criminal and Forensic Investigations. Credentialed authors, a published book, a course sold to and conducted in police departments nationwide; it all sounds scientific, proven, and legit.
However, as the ProPublica investigative article How Jessica Logan’s Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her
by Brett Murphy illustrates, the program not only appears to be pseudoscience but it’s pseudoscience that has cost people, like Logan, their freedom. Quoting the salient paragraphs from the report, which is recommended to you:
“Twenty researchers from seven federal government agencies, universities and advocacy groups have tested Harpster’s model against other samples of 911 calls to see if the guilty indicators he had identified did, in fact, correlate with guilt. They’ve consistently found no such relationship for most of the indicators. In two separate studies, experts at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit warned law enforcement officials to exercise caution when using 911 call analysis because their results contradicted so many of Harpster’s claims.
Given the popularity of the training course, one researcher told ProPublica, ‘we had to make sure it could be replicated — and it couldn’t.'”
If you have never heard of 911 call analysis used as evidence in criminal cases, you are not alone. It has flown under the radar of most, while police departments sign up to use the Harpster course as part of their on-the-job training.
911 analysis might be a useful tool, if it actually worked. To learn more about it, before it comes to your local police department and has an impact on a life near and dear to you, read How Jessica Logan’s Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her. w/c
Writer / Critic 