What's With All the GOATs in Science-Based Interviewing?

I get this question in almost every class I teach. Somebody raises a hand, half-smiling, and asks, "What's with all the goats?"

Fair question. There are goats on my slides. Goats during class activities. Goat swag. Goat stickers stuck to the inside of cabinet doors and in patrol cars at a police department I no longer work at. So here's the story and why it has more to do with improving interviewing and interrogation than you'd think.

Science-Based Interviewing methods create GOAT interviewers. This ixi swag is available in our next class. Stay GOATish!

It started as a thank-you note

Years ago, on the patrol side, I wanted a better way to say "nice job" than a generic email that dies in an inbox. So I ordered a stack of GOAT stickers online. Not serious goats. Goofy goats—goats on surfboards, goats on skateboards, goats on bikes, a goat DJing. Cartoon goats doing things goats have no business doing and if they did, it would be pandemonium.

My approach was simple. Somebody did something great; they got a GOAT sticker and a short handwritten note. An officer remains completely calm and shows poise while enduring a stream of abuse. GOAT sticker and a note. Somebody does the quiet, careful, unglamorous work that nobody's going to put in a press release? GOAT sticker and a note.

And GOAT became a verb. "Great job GOATing that one." "You absolutely GOATed that call." "That was goat-tastic." Made-up, a little dumb, and it worked.

When I returned to investigations, where I finished my career, the stickers came with me. Same rule, new work. A detective works a case everyone else had written off and gets it charged: GOAT sticker and a note. A detective runs an interview that pulls a case apart: GOAT sticker and a note. People started calling them GOAT notes.

Weekly, I asked every section commander the same question: who did great work this week? Not who closed the most cases. Who ran an interview where the science-based interviewing skills where active listening and rapport did the heavy lifting? In one case, detectives were stuck, they had spent a lot of time on the interview but were getting no where. We reapproached the evidence disclosure plan and the Strategic Use of Evidence during the second portion of the interview (a custodial interrogation, to be exact, one that wasn't confession-oriented) that ended with two people charged with second-degree murder in the death of a child.

Here's what I didn't plan for. The stickers took on a life of their own. They showed up on lockers, laptops, cabinet doors, the backs of monitors. People collected herds of them. Several investigator started buying screaming goat statues for their cubicles and we would hear them throughout the day. You'd see a lone goat sticker riding around on a patrol car's computer or on the cage between the front and back seats.

And the best part: it stopped being a supervisor thing. People started recognizing and tattletelling on each other. Peer to peer. I'd get emails or heads popping into my office saying, "Hey Captain, Sanchez sat with that mom for three hours after everybody else had gone home and got her through the worst night of her life. She deserves a GOAT."  That's the whole ballgame. You can't mandate a culture where people notice each other's good work. But you can start it, make it fun enough that people want in, and then get out of the way.

Science-Based Interview (SBI) training icebreaker. SBI turns experience into knowledge

Open-Ended Questions: The 14-minute answer

Now here's why I'm telling you this on an interviewing blog. And no, it isn't just to annoy the curmudgeons and the overly pedantic.

At the PD, I showed a video in our field-validated, evidence-based, science-based interviewing training. It was a TEDS question at the top of an interview. And the person on the other side of the table talked. And talked. Fourteen minutes off a single question on a violent murder.

Most of what he said was false but that is okay; it's still information. He was making things up about a case where we already knew a great deal — and he didn't know that we knew. He is now serving over 30 years for murdering his partner.

The reaction I sometimes get is: okay, so he lied for fourteen minutes. What did that get you?

Everything.

Lies are information. A false exculpatory statement is not a failure of the interview — it's a product of the interview. When someone tells you something that contradicts what the evidence already establishes, you have a documented, testifiable inconsistency between the account and the facts. That's not a feeling. That's not "he seemed deceptive." That's a thing a jury can hold. (We've gone deeper on this in our piece on the Strategic Use of Evidence.)

I had a student once — not a great interviewer, and not especially interested in becoming one (I always cringed when this person had a major case, yikes). When I made this point, he had his retort ready: "That's when I throw down the evidence and tell him he's lying. So he knows that I know."

Okay. Let's play that out.

That's winning to you. For your ego. Congratulations—he now knows exactly what you have and precisely how much you don't. You've torched whatever rapport was carrying the conversation, and the account closes.

And here's the part people miss: not all of your evidence exists yet. DNA isn't back. Toxicology isn't back. Ballistics, drug testing, the phone dump—potentially none of it, yet. Every extra minute he keeps talking is another statement you can hold up against evidence that lands three months from now or after charging. Kill the account today and you've forfeited all of it. You can't test a lie he never told you.

Then there's the part that'll actually bite you. Calling a suspect a liar can be ruled prejudicial. Your whole line of questioning gets redacted out of the transcript before a jury ever hears it. So you got your nine seconds of satisfaction in the room, and in exchange the jury doesn't get to hear that portion of your puny interview at all.

Not a great strategy for court there, bubba.

Winning the argument is not the job. Getting the information is the job.

And the information kept coming. Those fourteen minutes gave us a map. Every claim in there was a new interview objective. Every detail was a funnel to go down. Tell me more about that. Explain that part again. You cannot do that with a five-word denial.

In 2025, a detective came up to me after a science-based interviewing class and told me he'd used that same big opening question. Then he grinned and said he'd broken the record. Twenty-three minutes of an uninterrupted free narrative. Twenty-three minutes of a subject talking, on video, while a detective sat there and did the hardest thing in interviewing: listened. Active listening, information gathering, cataloging objectives, and staying curious. He knew he was being lied to the entire time. He took it all in anyway.

Because more information beats less information. Every single time.

That detective got a GOAT sticker for being a GOAT interviewer.

Statements are evidence—Science-Based Interviewing Treats Them That Way.

This is the thing science-based interviewing gets right and confession-driven methods get wrong.

A statement is not a step toward evidence. A statement is evidence. Statement evidence. It's collected, preserved, tested against the known facts, and put in front of a fact-finder—exactly like a fingerprint or a phone dump or a video pull. And like every other kind of evidence, the way you collect it determines whether it's any good.

Contaminate it—by disclosing what you know too early, by feeding details (leading questions), by arguing—and you've degraded the interview. Collect it cleanly, with open questions and an evidence disclosure plan, and you get more of it, and you get it in a form that holds up. Uncontaminated, corroborated statements are the gold standard.

This isn't just our claim. Our detectives participated in a field validation study — Evaluating the effectiveness of a practitioner-designed science-based interviewing and interrogation course: A collaborative training and research effort (Russano, Meissner, Jones, Rothweiler, Taylor, Cory, & Brandon, Legal and Criminological Psychology, 2026) — testing whether this science-based interview training actually changes what happens in real interview rooms. Not in a lab. In our rooms, on our cases.

What This Has to do With Investigations Leadership

If you run investigations—sworn or corporate, it doesn't matter—you are in the information business. Your team's output is information. Your risk exposure is bad information. Your credibility, in a courtroom or in front of a general counsel, in a deposition or in front of a review board, rests on whether the information was collected in a way that survives scrutiny.

So ask yourself the question I ask every class:

What's your plan if they don't confess?

If the honest answer is "there isn't one," your team isn't running interviews. They're running auditions for a confession, and the whole case is riding on the subject's willingness to cooperate and those legacy methods are not good at that. That's not a method. That's a wish.

The alternative is to build a team that competes on information. And that's where the GOATs come back in. When you publicly, repeatedly, and slightly ridiculously reward the detective who asked one good question and then shut up for twenty-three minutes, you're telling everyone what winning looks like. Not the confession. The information.

Investigative culture is just what you notice out loud. I chose to notice the GOATs.

A GOAT retirement gift from one of my favorite investigators and a guy I rode the streets with.

Some of the stickers were never about interviewing at all. Somebody went the extra mile for a victim. Somebody was excellent to a walk-in at the desk. Somebody made a bad day easier for the whole section. Sticker. It was never a performance metric. It was a way to keep people human with each other and to make it normal for a supervisor—or a peer—to say, "I saw that, and it mattered."

We had fun with it. That was the point.

So, what's with all the goats?

They started as a joke but became a standard. The joke is a cartoon goat on a skateboard. The standard is that around here, we treat statements like evidence, we ask before we tell, we let the lies come, and we count the information—not the confessions.

Please steal this idea.

IXI trains science-based interviewing and crisis communication for law enforcement, investigations, HR, corporate security, and leadership teams. Learn more about our science-based interviewing courses.