Nationally recognized expert in investigative interviewing and strategic communication, with more than 24 years of distinguished law enforcement experience.
INCI · CFI · Certified Polygraph Examiner · Former Senior Investigator, NYSP
Joseph (“Joe”) Auriemma, Jr. is a nationally recognized expert in investigative interviewing and strategic communication, with more than 24 years of distinguished experience in law enforcement. He retired as a Senior Investigator with the New York State Police, where he applied evidence-based interview strategies to the most legally consequential criminal investigations, including homicides, child exploitation cases, and sensitive internal inquiries.
Joe’s career began as a uniformed Trooper, where for seven years he conducted field interviews across traffic stops, scene canvasses, domestic calls, and patrol encounters, the moments where the interview happens before there is a recording device or a case file. He then served seventeen years in the Bureau of Criminal Investigations, including six and a half years in the Major Crimes Unit. Across 24 years of New York State Police practice, as a Trooper, an Investigator in the Bureau of Criminal Investigations, a Major Crimes Unit Investigator, a Certified Polygraph Examiner, and a Senior Investigator, Joe has personally conducted more than 12,000 interviews. Approximately 500 of those were recorded custodial interrogations. In Joe’s investigative practice, including the 2011 Nunez homicide investigation, he delivered the Reid Technique as he had been trained to deliver it. The resulting interrogations did not survive judicial review; the Nunez interrogation, in particular, was largely suppressed and the jury acquitted. The technique was applied as taught. The methodology produced the result it produced. Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™ are what Joe built in response. The lessons from that volume, including what accusatorial interrogation can produce when delivered as trained, inform every ASC course. As a Senior Investigator, he supervised 5 investigators and 29 uniformed troopers, with personal responsibility for the supervisory standards that govern how every interview, interrogation, and case file in the unit is conducted.
Joe led the New York State Police Polygraph Unit’s pre-employment program during a period when the unit conducted over 1,200 applicant polygraph examinations per year, in addition to its criminal examination caseload. He converted the unit’s pre-employment program to the Directed Lie Comparison Test methodology and personally authored the unit’s new examination manual, operating policy, and quality control system, the documentation framework that defined how every applicant examination was conducted, reviewed, and admitted into the agency’s hiring decisions. He served as one of two Regional Coordinators for the unit, overseeing 32 examiners, and has been a Certified Polygraph Examiner since 2015.
Joe served as lead instructor at the New York State Police Academy for four curriculum tracks: Investigative Interviewing, Crisis Negotiation, Basic Search Warrants, and Advanced Search Warrants. He also contributed at the New York State Preparedness Training Center across four additional faculty areas: Investigative Interviewing, Search Warrants, Cellular Phone Analysis, and Crisis Negotiation. Those Academy and NYSPTC tracks map directly to the disciplines now taught commercially through ASC and are the faculty-level foundation that the entire ASC curriculum is built on.
Across his Academy work and his subsequent commercial training career, Joe has trained more than 6,500 professionals in evidence-based investigative interviewing, behavioral observation, crisis negotiation, search warrant writing, and advanced investigative technique. His audience spans law enforcement, attorneys, HR professionals, Title IX administrators, educators, victim advocates, and sports organizations.
His contributions earned him the George M. Searle Memorial Award in 2019, an honor given to individuals who demonstrate excellence and lasting impact in law enforcement instruction.
Joe has also been featured in national television media, including appearances on Dateline and Rescue 911.
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Over twenty-four years of investigative work, Joe served as lead investigator or supervising investigator on some of the most complex homicide and major-crimes cases in his region. One of those cases, the Brandyn Foster homicide, produced an outcome that extended well beyond the original investigation.
During the investigation of the Brandyn Foster homicide, Joe worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, through FBI-facilitated coordination, spoke directly with engineering personnel at Google. That conversation revealed that certain deleted-user-data records existed within Google systems but were not being produced in response to lawful process. Those investigative findings directly contributed to changes in how Google documented deleted-data responses and to the development of what became known as the Google Tombstone Report, a record identifying data that once existed on Google systems but had since been deleted or rendered unavailable.
The legal-process discipline that produced that result, knowing what to ask for, how to articulate it, and how to anticipate provider response, is the same discipline Joe now teaches in ASC’s Precision Search Warrants course.
While the Brandyn Foster investigation shaped how Joe teaches search warrants, a different case shaped how he teaches interviewing. The 2011 Nunez homicide, and the seven-hour interrogation that ultimately produced a suppressed statement and an acquittal, became the case Joe carries with him every day. It is also the case that became the foundation of Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™. Read the Nunez Case ›
Today, Joe leads ASC, a professional training and consulting firm that equips law enforcement, government agencies, corporate teams, HR professionals, legal practitioners, educational institutions, and sports organizations with evidence-based investigative interviewing and strategic communication training. At ASC, Joe is the architect of Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™, proprietary frameworks that emphasize rapport-based, evidence-based investigative interviewing over the accusatorial interrogation methodologies (Reid Technique and the commercial derivatives that followed) that dominated American law enforcement training for forty years.
International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards & Training, National Certified Instructor
Certified Forensic Interviewer, demonstrated mastery in evidence-based investigative interviewing techniques
Certified since 2015; architect of the NYS Police Polygraph Unit’s Directed Lie pre-employment program and author of the unit’s examination manual, policy, and quality control system. Former Regional Coordinator overseeing 32 examiners.
George M. Searle Memorial Award, excellence and lasting impact in law enforcement instruction
Lead instructor at the New York State Police Academy for Investigative Interviewing, Crisis Negotiation, Basic Search Warrants, and Advanced Search Warrants. Also contributed at the NYS Preparedness Training Center across four additional faculty tracks.
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