J. (Jessica) A. Verhagen CPE

About Jessica

After graduating in Social and Organisational Psychology, Jessica spent 14 years working at the Ministry of Defence. During this time, she advanced from accident investigator at the Naval Staff of the Royal Netherlands Navy, to accident coordination POC at the Defence Staff and Security Authority, eventually becoming Head of Research and Risk Analysis at the Defence integrity organisation. She has extensive experience in conducting and coordinating large and complex incident and accident investigations in the Netherlands, deployment areas, and during exercises abroad. One of her key contributions is the Accident Severity Matrix, used by Defence to report incidents to the Dutch Safety Board (OVV).

Since March 2016, Jessica has also been trained as a Predictive Profiler and Linguistic Profiler, specialising in the Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN) method — a technique used worldwide by law enforcement agencies such as the Mossad, FBI, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She currently works part-time at the National Police | Criminal Investigation Department in The Hague, on cold cases, threat letters to politicians, and operational investigations as a linguistic profiler. Using the SCAN technique, she analyses letters, tweets, witness and suspect interviews, threat communications, online messages, and other forms of written communication for linguistic indicators suggesting partial or complete deception at a specific moment in the interview or on a certain topic.

Within the Predictive Profiling training programme at Sosecure, Jessica also teaches the SCAN technique. In addition, she is a lecturer at the investigative collective Dupin, a civilian-led cold case initiative with around 2,000 volunteers working to solve unsolved cases.

"Liars rely on you listening poorly and giving them the benefit of the doubt when they misspeak. If you stop doing that, an entirely new world opens up to you."“