Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

What motivates you?
What are you thinking?
Are you dangerous?
Barry Spodak is an expert in threat assessment. He has studied people who
keep the darkest, most dangerous secrets. He knows how to talk to them and he
has developed protocols for questioning them and building bridges so they will
open up, even a little. He wants to get them to reveal their thoughts and
intentions so he can determine whether they are on “a path to violence.” But
what Barry has learned on the fringes can be applied to the mainstream. His
tools can be put to work in everyday places.
Barry and I have known one another for years. His gentle demeanor belies
his work on the dark side of humanity. Barry trains FBI and Secret Service
agents and U.S. Marshals in questioning potential serial killers, terrorists, or
would-be presidential assassins before they act. Sometimes he dresses up—
beard, tattoos, earrings—to give his agent-students a living, breathing suspect so
they can role-play the conversation. Barry can be a white supremacist, a Middle
Eastern arms merchant, or a Christian or Muslim extremist. His disguises would
make his favorite Hollywood makeup artist proud.
To Barry, everyone is a puzzle. Some people are just more complex, more
mysterious, and more urgent to put together than others. He’s been drawn to
them all his life, dramatically discovering this line of work when he was a young
graduate student in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. His focus was on
violent criminals who had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity. His
studies involved fieldwork at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital—in its day, one of the
premier psychiatric facilities in the country. To get locked up in a psych ward,
someone had to be judged a danger to themselves or others. The challenge was
how to determine if someone actually posed a threat. There was little research at
the time, so psychologists and law enforcement alike struggled for a consistent
approach to threat assessment.

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Barry’s responsibilities at St Elizabeth’s included leading group therapy
sessions. One day, a newcomer joined the group. He sat off to the side,
watching, listening, but seldom participating. He seemed subdued, quiet, and
innocuous enough. He had no previous history of mental illness. There was no
outward indication that he posed a threat to anyone. Yet everyone knew the stark
reality: He had tried to kill the president of the United States.
John Hinckley Jr. had pulled the trigger six times on his .22 caliber revolver
outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, as President Ronald
Reagan exited the building and made his way to the motorcade. The first bullet
went into the head of White House Press Secretary James Brady. The second
struck police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of the neck. The third hit the
window of a building across the street. Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr
pushed Reagan into the limousine as a fourth bullet hit Secret Service Agent
Timothy McCarthy in the abdomen as he spread his body over Reagan. The fifth
hit the side of the limousine. The sixth bullet ricocheted off the limousine and hit
the president under his left arm and entered his body, lodging in his lung, one
inch from his heart. The president nearly died as a result of a staph infection that
followed.
Hinckley had been obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster. He had stalked her
when she was at Yale. He thought killing the president would get her attention
and impress her. A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. He was
twenty-six years old when he joined Barry’s group therapy session for the first
time.
In therapy, Hinckley said little. On occasion he would mention something
about life inside the institution or about other patients or the staff. Barry recalled
that Hinckley seemed scared of the other patients; he didn’t talk much to anyone
in the early days. Barry tried to draw him out.