FOREIGN LANGUAGE INTERVIEWS, LONG-TERM UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATIONS, AND WITNESS PROTECTION - 052

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TRANSCRIPT:

This week on The Writer's Detective Bureau, foreign language interviews, long-term undercover investigations, and witness protection. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is The Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode 52 of the writer's detective bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality, crime-related fiction. And this week, I'd like to thank gold shield patrons, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, CCC. Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicki Tharp of vickitharp.com, Dharma Kelleher of dharmakelleher.com, Chrysann, Jimmy Cowe of crimibox.com, and Larry Darter of larrydarter.com for their support.

I'd also like to thank my newest coffee club patrons Ann Bell Feinstein, Zara Altair, Terry Thomas, and Carol Tate, along with all of my other loyal coffee club patrons for their support month after month. You can find links to all of the writers supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/52. And to learn about setting up your own Patreon account for your author business, visit writersdetective.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

If you're new to the podcast or you haven't subscribed to the APB mailing list yet, it's a once a month email from me that's just a handful of curated links to things I think you will like, or at least will find useful for your crime fiction writing, things like news articles for story inspiration, white papers from think tanks about anything from advances in CSI or technology or best practices or blog posts from writing experts, things like that. So if you're interested in getting an email from me once a month with those things, you can join by going to writersdetective.com/mailinglist.

So when I launched this podcast nearly a year ago, I started out wanting to help as many writers as I could, and I was just a detective with a microphone. Okay, I had a few hundred writers that would read my blog, but they weren't necessarily podcast listeners. One year and over 25,000 downloads later, 25,000 times, writers like you took a few minutes to listen, writers from 62 countries and 49 of the 50 states plus the district of Columbia. And by the way, what's up, South Dakota? Are the Badlands really that bad? Come on, show me some love. I know you've got crime writers in South Dakota.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I am grateful for you, so thank you so much for listening and sending in questions each week for me to answer. When I started my blog in 2015, I started with the same number of readers or listeners or viewers as every other creator out there, and that number was zero. If you're a writer, you started there, too. You may feel like you have zero readers now, but so did every other writer, and not just when they started out. It takes years of work, of honing any craft, to get halfway decent enough to even be noticed. So do not judge your skill or your worth especially by the size of your audience or by the reviews on some marketplace or any other vanity metric.

Create every day and ship out your work. It needs to be going out in the world to get noticed. And even then, being noticed does not matter. Stats do not matter. You can skew stats. Take my stats. 25,000 downloads in a year. What does that really mean? My best estimate is that I have 500 friends like you listening to me right now being one of those friends. I have 500 friends that listen each week. That's not some huge number, especially if we're having some sort of popularity contest. It doesn't make me Internet famous. It doesn't land me advertising deals, but nor does it mean that I'm a failure. It means I have 500 people like you holding me accountable every week to create an episode. It means I have a real reason to improve at whatever I'm creating and where there are five, there are 50 which will become 500, 5,000, and so on.

And it's a pretty good thing that we do most of our learning and our screw ups when we have those five or 50 or 500 fans, rather than making those big beginner mistakes that we all make with five million people taking notice. So enjoy the creation process. That is key to persisting. Creating is what matters. Getting better, moving forward is what matters. Learn your craft and block out your time to create. What you do today creates your tomorrow.

This week's first question comes from Louise Barton who writes, "Dear Adam, I listen to your show on the way to work. Thanks for taking the time to answer so many interesting questions. Your podcast gives me loads of food for thought. I want to set a story in France. My detective needs to interview two witnesses to a death, but they don't speak French, only Arabic or English. My detective also speaks fluent English, so could I conduct the interviews in English, but I'd like to know whether, generally speaking, there are any legal requirements with nationals of other countries to conduct interviews in their native language. Would a detective be allowed to use a foreign language, in this case, English for conducting interviews and then perhaps have the recordings of the interviews transcribed or translated into French at a later point to comply with legal requirements?"

Thank you for the question, Louise. You have two competing issues here. First, you need the witness statement to reflect the actual intention and meaning of the witness to capture the most accurate description of what happened. So naturally that would occur through the statement given in a witness's native tongue. And this also brings up the issue of how effectively the investigator can adequately question the witness. And by that I mean if both are trying to communicate with each other in a secondary or tertiary language, a lot of information or description can be lost along the way.

I don't know of any formal rule that requires an interview to be conducted in a witness's native language. That may be something that exists in French law that I'm not aware of, but we are always looking for best evidence no matter who's doing the investigation. So if both are fluent in a common language that should suffice for an interview. But fluent can be subjective. Important details that come from an interview are often subtle, so you can lose that when one of the parties isn't totally fluent in a language.

Even something as innocuous as a detailed color description can play a vital role. For example, asking, "What was the color of the gun?" What would you expect a non-native speaker to say? Now, regardless of which language we're talking about, how deep a grasp do they have with their adjectives? So what was the color of the gun? Black, silver, metal? Those are pretty good descriptions for any investigation, right? Especially if it's their second language.

But what if they're really trying to translate something that's more nuanced, which potentially would be more helpful? Something like blued or nickel or chrome? That can really be the difference of what we're looking for on a murder weapon when we're talking about writing a search warrant or seizing evidence. It really comes down to both parties feeling comfortable in effectively communicating for this first half of the issues that I mentioned at the start of this. So that second issue that I alluded to is that the courts will likely require a transcript of the interview, along with a transcribed translation in the native tongue that's used in the courtroom. And you kind of referenced that in your question.

Normally, I would talk about the discovery process and how evidence is shared between the prosecution and defense at this point. But I feel obligated to mention that things are significantly different with French criminal procedure. I'll include a link to a very eyeopening criminal defense wiki page in the show notes, which you can find at writerdetective.com/52, that illustrates some major differences between French criminal procedure and the Anglo-American legal systems most of us write about.

So how do we actually accomplish these foreign language interviews in real life? Well, if as the detective, I feel that we can't adequately communicate due to language differences, I can use a translation service via telephone. For us, it's a toll-free number that will have certified translators in hundreds of different languages or dialects. And I can just put them on speaker phone right there in the interview room. And I will of course add the translator's name and contact information into my report. But they will literally act as a translator as if they were sitting there in the room with us by doing so over the phone, and of course, I'm recording the entire interaction in that interview room.

But when it comes time for the witness to testify in court, he or she will take the stand and testify in their native language with a court-certified translator for that language, doing realtime translation for the witness and the court. So in your story, Louise, you would have an Arabic to French translator both on the phone and in the courtroom, but there's nothing that I know of preventing the original interview being between the detective and the witness from occurring in English so long as it was recorded, transcribed and translated into French for the official record.

Danielle Norman of daniellenorman.com asked this in The Writer's Detective Facebook group, which you are welcome to join if you haven't already. And I will have links to that in the show notes as well. So Danielle asked, "Before someone goes undercover for a longterm assignment, what type of background material is collected and researched? And is there a particular name for this form? For example, my husband has to have this done every 10 years and it's called an SF86 but that's for the DOD."

So the DOD is the Department of Defense and SF 86 is the standard form 86, which is used for security clearances. So thank you for the question, Danielle. And I see from the subsequent comments in Facebook that you're actually specifically curious about the ATF. For those of you that aren't familiar with the ATF, they are the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is a bureau within the United States Department of Justice.

And I don't know that there's actually any additional background material being collected specifically for undercover work from the agent, because that kind of background investigation is done for preemployment, and as you mentioned Danielle, for a federal security clearance, which as an ATF special agent, you would be going through every five years or so because you would have that clearance. That SF86 form that Danielle mentioned is the background packet that everyone seeking or renewing a security clearance must complete. And I've included a link to an old SF86 form in the show notes for you to take a look at just to see the kind of questions that are asked and the modern version of the SF86 is completed online, but it's used by all federal security clearance holders, not just the Department of Defense. And the things that you put into those will get researched and checked and then it's also very possible that you will have to submit to a polygraph to check the veracity of your answers in this big packet.

So, while there likely isn't any additional background check for an undercover assignment since they are already subject to these background checks regardless of their assignment in the ATF, the feds do have pre-operational and post-operational sessions with the employee specific to the undercover work, and it will be part operational briefing or debriefing and part psychological stress management work. At least this is the case for agents going undercover for FBI investigations.

I don't know if you'll find anything about this process or this practice online, but I can tell you that it does exist. I cannot say for certain that the ATF does the same pre and post psych sessions, but having worked with several undercover ATF crews, I can tell you that they are some of the best in the business. If you're selected to work an undercover assignment for ATF, you are assigned to a specific unit that only does undercover work, so it's not like you're all of a sudden pulled from your office cubicle and the rest of your agent coworkers are wondering where you went. For safety and security sake, I'm not going to go into too much more detail, but as an author, you can let your imagination be your guide on how you would run a longterm undercover investigation.

The one important thing to understand is that the undercover agent is not running this case solo. The UC, as we call it, will have a handler. The handler is also an ATF agent, a special agent, but they're the ones responsible for being the UC's single point of contact for anything and everything that they need, and similarly, the handler is the one relaying info back to the UC. Even though the UC is the one smack dab in the middle of the action, the UC is not the case agent and by case agent, I mean the one in charge of the investigation. I know this seems odd, but it's to ensure the safety of the undercover agent and that the case is investigated properly.

One of the psychological things that often occurs to UCs is a change in risk aversion behavior. When you are immersed in your undercover persona, especially for a prolonged amount of time, you may be swinging through all sorts of heightened emotional states from extreme stress and fear to the point of panic attacks and nightmares to feelings of invincibility and superiority. And the ladder often leads to emboldened and risky behavior that can be life threatening.

And this is where it becomes vitally important for the undercover agent to also not be the case agent, not be the one directing where everything is going when it comes to this investigation. And like most lessons learned in law enforcement, this UC is not the case agent is a lesson that was painfully learned by undercover cops getting killed by making poor decisions. So thank you so much for your question, Danielle. I hope this helps and you can find Danielle's work at daniellenorman.com

Also from the Facebook group, Mariana Calderon wrote, "Hello again. I hope you can help me with this. If a detective, big city, big agency, has an important witness that might be in danger, how much resources he or she would possibly have to protect this witness? Let's say to have a police car outside the witness' house, for example. I imagine the resources would be quite limited, but I don't really know. Thank you in advance."

Thanks for the question, Mariana. I know you've got some answers in the Facebook group, but I want to add to it. Witness protection is one of the more popular tropes we see in television and movies that isn't usually exactly accurate. Reality is that it takes money and resources to protect someone, just like you alluded to in your question, and it's not to say that witnesses lives aren't important, but any witness to a violent crime might be in danger. So providing physical protection to witnesses really comes down to a threat assessment. Is there actually a threat to the witness' life and how credible is it and is the time frame for this threat?

So with your scenario, Mariana, in a big city with a big police agency, I'm assuming this is not a federal case, but a local one being handled by a local but big police department. It would really be up to the witness to get away from the threat or the danger by moving away from where anyone might find them. The prosecutor's office likely has a victim witness coordinator that can assist with funding a move and the like. But providing physical protection to a witness at the local level usually happens in the immediate lead up to testimony in court.

So if you are the witness to a particularly heinous gang-related murder, let's say, and they know who you are and where you live, and they have either made it known that you should be killed on site, which the gangs will call a green light, or there's already been an attempt on your life, then you will get help in moving away from the area from the prosecutor and the police, assuming you have agreed to testify at the trial. Simply witnessing a crime is not going to get you additional protection.

Once you've moved away and are living a relatively safe lifestyle, in other words, not making it easy for anyone to find you ... What? No Instagram or Facebook? But once you start getting close to the time of having to testify, the police and the prosecution will arrange to have you protected when you come back to town to make your court appearance. I've spent many hours in a motel room with a murder witness doing nothing but watching TV and staying away from the windows. But once this testimony was over, we drove him back to his home state or his new home state to live his normal life.

So in your case, Mariana, the police would be more likely to move the witness from the house and put them up in a motel. Staying in a compromised location, meaning a place where the bad guys will know where to find the witness, is not ideal. If the police department is going to go to the expense of around the clock protection, even if it's just a police car out front of the house, they would definitely make the extra effort of moving the witness to someplace safer like a hotel or a motel.

The witness protection concept we see on TV is largely taken from the federal witness protection system that is run by the United States Marshall Service, and usually for testimony against criminal organizations with a large and violent reach like the mafia or other organized crime groups where murdering witnesses is a serious and legitimate concern. And in those cases, the US Marshall Service will arrange for a new name, identification, place to live and a job. But that's about it. It's up to the witness to keep a low profile and not contact anyone from their old life that will lead to anyone finding them.

So I hope that helps answer your question, Mariana.

Thank you so much for listening this week. Make sure you hit that subscribe button to get every episode of The Writer's Detective Bureau podcast automatically. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you do me the huge favor of leaving me a review? Thank you so much. Just remember that this podcast is created for you. So don't be shy. Send me your crime fiction questions by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week and write well.