Apprehended Without Warrant

• Author: Katherine M. Newbold,Richard Gist,Jeffrey M. Lohr
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854808321655
• Published date: 01 October 2008
• Date: 01 October 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

APPREHENDED WITHOUT WARRANT

Issues of Evidentiary Warrant for Critical Incident

Services and Related Trauma Interventions in a

Federal Law Enforcement Agency

KATHERINE M. NEWBOLD

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Retired

JEFFREY M. LOHR

University of Arkansas

RICHARD GIST

Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences

The practice of professional psychology was founded on empirical science. Subsequent development of the profession reveals

a gap that is partially the result of the popularization of junk science in legal and judicial domains. A greater threat comes

from pseudoscience, which presents serious professional issues for those who work in trauma-related emergency services and

law enforcement. The most widely promoted service is Critical Incident Stress Debriefing and Management, but scientific

evidence does not justify its application. The authors describe the promotion and implementation of these services within the

FBI and the professional difficulties that ensued. They also provide suggestions as to how such difficulties could have been

avoided and apply them to other domains of law enforcement.

Keywords: pseudoscience; efficacy; professional; ethics; law enforcement; debriefing; Critical Incident Stress Debriefing

and Management

The development of the healing arts in Western society has been characterized, particularly

in the past century, by increasingly strong subservience of its practice to its scientific

underpinnings. The prescriptions of the Flexner Report on American medical education

(Flexner, 1910; also see Beck, 2004) grounded the preparation of medical practitioners firmly

in empirical studies of life sciences and treatment efficacy. Recent movements to harness

advances in analytic design and information technology to further advance adherence to

evidence-based strategies for treatment and practice underscore the preeminence and the

“staying power” of this epistemic frame (cf. Guyatt et al., 1992). Advancement in the state of

the art has been built on advancement in the state of the science; although profound respect

is rendered to artisan elements of practice, the direction of the evidentiary warrant through the

century has continued to move progressively in the direction of empirical science.

The practice of professional psychology represents, we might argue, a paradoxical

inverse to this trend. Early clinical psychology differentiated itself by its strict adherence to

an empiricist epistemology, with the pre-eminence of the epistemic frame clearly declared

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 35 No. 10,October 2008 1337-1353

DOI: 10.1177/0093854808321655

© 2008 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

AUTHORS’NOTE: Please address correspondence to Jeffrey M. Lohr, Department of Psychology, University

of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701; e-mail: jlohr@uark.edu.

in its pursuit of the “scientist practitioner” model of education and practice codified by the

American Psychological Association’s 1947 Boulder Conference on Graduate Education in

Clinical Psychology (Shakow, 1947). This stood in marked contrast to the psychoanalytic

and neoanalytic schools of thought then prevalent in psychiatric practice. Yet even as psy-

chiatric practice has narrowed its domain progressively toward increasingly classical med-

ical views of etiology and intervention, professional psychology overall has followed a

profoundly different path, expanding both its membership and its domain to include a

diverse and almost amorphous collection of philosophies, practitioners, and epistemic

frames. Some of these are fundamentally incompatible with the empiricist constructions

that were once professional psychology’s most essential foundation.

The gap between mental health practice and the science that provides the evidential war-

rant for those applications has grown and may be accelerating. The manifestations of this

widening disjunct are most obvious in the public domain, where clinical services are often

promoted with little scientific justification (Lilienfeld, Lynn, & Lohr, 2003). The introduc-

tion of certain treatments claimed by proponents to be both novel and extraordinary has

been based on little more than personal testimony, vivid case studies, and enthusiastic pro-

motion by those who benefit from their application (Herbert et al., 2000; Kalal, 1999; Lohr,

2001). There is no formal regulation of clinical services beyond the regulation of profes-

sional service providers by state and provincial licensing bodies; there are no governmen-

tal bodies (e.g., U.S. Food and Drug Administration) or accreditation agencies (e.g., Joint

Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations) to evaluate or regulate treat-

ments or their provision. Mental health services are promoted and vended with no more

oversight than that afforded to commercially marketed vitamins and food supplements.

Although the gap between evidence and practice may represent a rejection of scientific

epistemology by some, it more often represents a misunderstanding of the nature of scien-

tific inquiry. There has been a disturbing rebuke of scientific epistemology in some quar-

ters, where “alternative ways of knowing” clinical phenomena have been advanced (Kvale,

1992; Schon, 1983; Tsoi-Hoshmand & Polkinghorne, 1992). This is best characterized as

“nonscience” (Lilienfeld, Fowler, Lohr, & Lynn, 2005).

Lilienfeld and Landfield (2008) address other threats to evidence-based practice, specifi-

cally pseudoscience and junk science. Junk science comes in two forms. One occurs in the

context of legal proceedings, entering as expert testimony by psychologists and other mental

health professionals in the context of litigation (Huber, 1991; Park, 2000; Raso, Shindell,

Cragin, & Ross, 2001). Such testimony addresses psychological phenomena or services for

which scientific evidence does not meet legal standards (e.g., federal rules of evidence), as

in the Frye Test or Daubert Standard (McCann, Shindler, & Hammond, 2003). Junk science

is also found in media, where mental health issues are commercialized through entertain-

ment, advertising, and psychological advice giving (Wilson, 2003). In either context, junk

science is manifested by opinion posing as empirical evidence, or through evidence of ques-

tionable warrant, based on inadequate scientific methodology.

Science and pseudoscience are not always categorically distinct (Lilienfeld & Landfield,

2008; Lohr, Montgomery, Lilienfeld, & Tolin, 1999). A number of features characterize

pseudoscientific discourse:

1. promotion of an idea or product through persuasion as a principal goal;

2. misappropriation of constructs and concepts from allied disciplines, providing the trappings

of scientific inquiry without its substance;

1338 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR