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surely knew better—seemed not to consider the myriad ways their subjects came forearmed. Countermeasures to lie detection are as old as lie detection itself.
    All through 1921, long after Graham had returned to Kansas, the petty thefts continued in the College Hall residence. In retrospect, Larson wondered whether some of the young women had conspired to distract him during the exam. He bemoaned the way his investigation had been hurried. He should have been allowed to test the chambermaids, he said, not to mention the housemother and her family. It would become a familiar regret; get hold of a lie detector, and who knew whom you could trust?

Chapter 2
Policing the Polis
    In a certain sense, a large part of the criminalist’s work is nothing more than a battle against lies. He has to discover the truth and must fight the opposite….Utterly to vanquish the lie, particularly in our work, is of course, impossible, and to describe its nature exhaustively is to write the natural history of mankind.
    —HANS GROSS, CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1898
    BERKELEY TODAY STILL CONJURES UP IMAGES FROM THE 1960s, when protesters smeared the town’s police officers as "pigs." Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, Berkeley was world-famous as the seedbed for a new kind of police officer: technologically sophisticated, respectful of the law, and closely allied to social work. This reputation was the legacy of Chief August Vollmer, often considered "the most significant individual in the annals of American law enforcement." By 1920 he was the nation’s most famous cop, and Berkeley was his experimental proving ground. The lie detector was an integral part of Vollmer’s program to regenerate the morality of both the police and Berkeley.
    There was no limit to Larson’s admiration for Vollmer. To say that Vollmer was the father he would have wanted is to reduce to a pop-psychological commonplace what Larson expressed in far loftier terms. He dedicated his first book to "the genius and altruism of Chief August Vollmer, humanitarian, scientist and criminologist." Vollmer, a man who never passed the sixth grade, replied with characteristic verve: "First of all I am not a humanitarian, I’m a ‘cop.’ Secondly, I am not a scientist, I am a good guesser. And thirdly, I am not a criminologist because a criminologist has recently been defined as one who studies crime and knows nothing about it."
    August Vollmer knew something about crime. He was born in New Orleans in 1876 to German immigrants. His father died when he was eight, and his mother settled in Berkeley in 1891, when Vollmer was fifteen. He grew to be a tall young man with swimmer’s shoulders and a long face with pale lips and clear gray eyes. He could appear stern and unyielding, but he was a keen observer of human foibles and comfortable with people from all walks of life. Everyone wanted to please him.
    When he was twenty-one Vollmer sold his feed store and volunteered for the Spanish-American War, during which he served in the military police and ran river patrols against Philippine guerrilla groups, adapting his tactics and cutting deals with locals. By his own account it was the formative experience of his life. On his return to Berkeley he worked as a letter carrier until 1905, when Friend W. Robinson, publisher of the Berkeley Gazette (and future governor of California), recruited him to run for town marshal. According to the paper, not only did Vollmer possess the requisite "mental acuity and sagacity"; he had the "physical strength to cope with any criminal."
    Vollmer was swept into office in a three-to-one landslide, along with a slate of other Republican "good government" candidates. Twenty-nine years old, without formal experience in law enforcement, he relied on his own rigorous integrity, judgment of character, and military-minded ability to match means to ends. Immediately he persuaded the city board of trustees to replace the two part-time deputies with six