Scarecrow Cops
Sometimes the only difference between an ex-con and a security guard is a uniform.
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To his left sat a clean ashtray. I was nervous and was tempted to calm myself with a cigarette. After thinking a moment, however, I decided not to. In the clean, scientifically neutral atmosphere of his office, I told myself, the ashtray was probably a trap: whoever smoked during interrogation would probably come under suspicion. I suppressed the nicotine urge and kept on lying.
After questioning me for ten to fifteen minutes, the examiner led me to a completely unadorned room, furnished with only a desk and a chair that was turned toward a blank wall. He quickly seated me, telling me to look straight ahead, not at the polygraph machine on the desk or at him. Standing at my back he placed a piece of plastic tubing around my chest to measure respiration. Then he fastened a blood pressure cuff onto my left arm and connected two or three metal sensors to the fingers of my right hand, to measure perspiration. He told me not to move, to breathe calmly, and to answer his questions with a simple yes or no.
After a few seconds, the grilling began. First he asked questions like “Are you thirty-six years old?” and “Were you born in Oklahoma?” I truthfully answered yes to these. In the same steady, neutral voice, he then asked, “Did you tell the truth about your employment history?” and “Did you tell the truth about your arrest record?” I lied on these, as any convict would have. His last questions, I believe, was “Have you ever lied to an employer?” I said no.
He shut off the machine and began making preparations of some sort; I couldn’t tell exactly what. He asked me what I had meant when I told him that I had never lied to an employer, “It’s like I said during the interview,” I insisted. “I’m old enough that I’m sure I’ve lied about somebody being sick, or somebody being late to work, or something like that. I don’t know exactly what I’ve lied about, but I put down on the form that I had never lied, because I’ve never lied about anything important.”
He told me to keep my eyes to the wall and, after a moment, turned on his machine and began asking questions again. His first queries, I believe, were the same ones about my name, age, and birthplace. His last, I think, was “Is it true what you told me a minute ago about never having lied to an employer?”
“Not about anything important,” I replied, hoping to throw his machine off by not responding with a simple yes or no. The examiner did not protest my answer, and he promptly shut off his polygraph. He told me to rise, and he ushered me out of the room, shaking my hand and wishing me good luck as he did. He said that if I would call the security company in an hour, I would be told the outcome of the test. When I did I was told that I had a job, beginning the next day.
The company issued me a brown and tan uniform that looked like something a bullring cop might wear. Though it is illegal for a guard to carry a pistol until he has been trained and licensed, he can use a shotgun or rifle in his work, and on my first job, as a night guard at the A. J. Foyt Chevrolet dealership, I was given a shotgun. The work was lonely, cold, and boring; I quit after one night. In an effort to keep me, the company offered new assignments, which I took. I spent one day at Saks Fifth Avenue, watching shoppers and wrangling with discourteous parking space competitors, then went on guard at an office building on Main, where I stayed for several days before quitting for good.
After my success with the first company, I decided to up the ante on the job-hunting game. I began seeking jobs under a false identity. I didn’t think it would be easy to lie to a professional polygrapher about things as fundamental as name, age, and place of birth. A friend had advised me that criminals sometimes prepare themselves to “beat the box” by taking tranquilizers before exams. I decided to try the trick myself. An hour before my second polygraph interrogation, for Southwestern Security Systems, I took an ordinary tablet of Valium.
This test, in a building like the first with an examiner who used a similar procedure involved questions that were a bit tougher (and probably intended to smoke out union organizers). “Were you planted on this job?” the examiner asked me. I said no, I wasn’t. “Have you stated your real reasons for wanting this job? Are you satisfied with the wages you have been offered?” I sat and lied and, thanks to the Valium, was not unnerved. I passed. The company offered me a job at a savings and loan office, but I balked when I was told that deductions would be made from my salary to pay for my uniforms.
By the time I took my third exam, I was emboldened and pushing my luck. I wanted to see if polygraph tests were any good at all as a hiring tool. I decided not to protect myself with relaxants and to use a new, more stringent standard for formulating answers: if you can possibly lie about anything, do. The exam, for a job with the Wackenhut Corporation (the third-largest security company in the nation), was held at the offices of Ernie Hulsey & Associates, a firm employing about a half-dozen polygraphers and located in a building on the Southwest Freeway near Bellaire. My examiner was a feisty thirty-year-old in a dark three-piece business suit, not a sedate, low-key character like my previous inquisitors. Instead of discouraging me from viewing his apparatus, this examiner began by showing it to me.
A polygraph machine is a device about the size of a stereo tuner with wires and cords leading out from it. Like an electrocardiograph, it has a series of needles that make markings on a roll of graph paper. The other machines I’d glimpsed were portable affairs in metal boxes, but the one shown to me for the third exam was permanently mounted into the desk of the interrogation room. My examiner gave me an animated little lecture on its operation – a talk calculated, no doubt, to arouse my anxiety.
“If you’ll think back to when you were a little boy,” he said, “you can probably remember that sometime your mother asked you a question about something you had done, and you lied. You were afraid when you lied, because you knew that if you got caught, you’d be punished. Well, this machine works the same way. Although nothing can perhaps approach the level of fear you felt as a child for your mother, there will always be a discomfort and a trace of fear when you lie. And this machine,” he said, sweeping his hand over it, “will tell us when you are nervous because you are lying.” The lecture kindled a little dread in my heart.
The examiner began the familiar questions. Because I was determined to tell grand lies, and because I’d already told them on the form his office had given me, I answered yes to queries like “Are you thirty-four years old?” and “Were you born in Texas?” I maintained my lies about my employment and arrest record – this time I claimed no arrests at all. The examiner asked me perhaps ten questions, the usual number, and then stopped his machine, letting off the pressure on the arm cuff as he did so. In plain view, he changed the roll of paper in his machine and added ink to one of its vials. After completing his tasks, he puffed up the cuff again and repeated the questions, as polygraphers always do. I lied again.
At the end of the exam, which took about fifty minutes, he laid out in front of him the two paper tapes. With a felt-tip pin, he made marks of them, charting their high and low points, writing numbers and letters below. The procedure appeared very scientific to me. I looked at the machine, which seemed formidable, and at my examiner, who seemed to be intent on his markings. Then I looked at the charts, which didn’t appear identical to me. I decided that I had probably flunked this, my third and toughest test. The suspense got the better of me. “Did I pass?” I asked him, unable to contain myself.
“Well, yes, you did,” he remarked after a pause. “Why do you ask – did you lie?”
Preemployment polygraph testing may not detect anything, and it is an expensive procedure, usually billed to the guard company at $30 to $100 an exam. Not all guard companies in Houston require it. Hiring standards at most firms are minimal, expressed by the litany I heard one afternoon in an interviewing office: “Are you eighteen, a citizen, do you have a car, a telephone, a clear police record, and a pair of black shoes?” and if my experience is typical, most security companies in Houston make no attempt to verify the information applicants give them.
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