When Employees Confess, Sometimes Falsely

[jsr]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/business/when-employees-confess-sometimes-falsely.html

When Employees Confess, Sometimes Falsely
By SAUL ELBEIN | MARCH 8, 2014

When an AutoZone investigator approached Chris Polston, asking for his help investigating a theft, Mr. Polston was happy to oblige.

He was 20, had worked for AutoZone all through high school in Maryland, and, after graduation, moved to take a job with the chain in Houston. He and his wife had a child on the way, and he thought that AutoZone, the car parts retailer, could be a place to build a career.

That morning in 2010, it all came undone.

According to an account of the day given by Mr. Polston in interviews and in a civil suit against AutoZone, Conrad Castillo, an AutoZone investigator, sat him down in the store’s overstock room between a cinder-block wall and a row of batteries. At first, he said, the investigator was friendly, making small talk about the joys of fatherhood. “He was talking to me as if we’d known each other for 10 years and we were at a barbecue,” Mr. Polston said.

[Skeeter Barnes]

1. They can't hold a person hostage. If they won't put you to work, get up and leave.

If they say you can't leave, call the cops and tell them you're being held against your will. No goddamn way they're going to lock me in some room. And don't ever sign anything saying you did something that you didn't do!

[1monster]

2. I just told my son that if he were ever in a similar situation, and he was innocent

To pull out his phone and tell them that he was calling the cops. Also, that the no recording rule is the "investigator's problem, not his, so go ahead and record... and to sign nothing.

[Skeeter Barnes]

3. That is exactly right. We are not their prisoners and they do not make the laws.