Analyses of real-life police interviews with suspects: Strategies used and suspect responses.

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Analyses of real-life police interviews with
suspects Strategies used and suspect responses.

• Ray Bull and Samantha Leahy-Harland

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1. Reasons for coercion

• One of the major assumptions underlying
  justification for the use of coercive
  interrogation techniques is the pervasive belief
  (noted by Richard Leo) that
• suspects almost never confess spontaneously but
  virtually always in response to police pressure
  (Leo, 2008, p. 162) and that
• Confessions, especially to serious crimes, are
  rarely made spontaneously. Rather they are
  actively elicitedtypically after sustained
  psychological pressure. (Leo, 2008, p. 119).

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2. The traditional way

• In many countries the traditional way that
  investigators have interrogated those whom they
  suspect of having been involved in wrong-doing
  has involved a pressurising or oppressive
  approach. For example,
• in India a fairly recent survey found that some
  police officers said that they do use a variety
  of intimidation techniques (Alison, Sarangi,
  Wright, 2008)
• the Reid approach which is widely used in the
  USA (and is exported to other countries) has been
  criticised for being sufficiently coercive to
  cause false confessions
• in North America a 2005 analysis of eleven
  guidance books/manuals found that among the
  tactics most widely recommended were
  minimisation, maximisation, and the
  use/mention of false evidence.

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3. Suspects Interview Intentions

• Recently a limited amount of relevant research on
  a new topic has consistently found that a
  substantial proportion of guilty suspects had
  not, in fact, decided to deny/say nothing in
  their forthcoming police interviews (e.g. St-Yves
  and Des Lauriers-Varin, 2009). For example, in
  Australia Kebbell, Hurren, and Mazerolle (2006)
  found that
• only a half of the convicted sex offenders with
  whom they held a research interview said that
  they had entered the police interview having
  already decided whether to deny or admit to the
  crime(s) they had committed less than 20 had
  planned to deny and around 30 had planned to
  admit/give a truthful account.
• The other 50 said they entered the police
  interview not yet having decided whether to deny
  or to admit/give a truthful account.

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4. Reactance

• Kebbell, Alison, and Hurren (2008) noted that
  some guilty suspects who (prior to and/or at the
  beginning of the interview) may be considering
  whether to admit/give a truthful account may
  subsequently decide not to simply because of the
  way they are being interviewed.
• This psychological reactance has also been
  mentioned by Gudjonsson (2006) and by Holmberg
  and Christianson (2002) among others, but the
  frequency with which it occurs in the
  interviewing of suspects is deserving of much
  greater research attention.

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5. An association between interviewing style and
denials?

• In Sweden, whether denial or admittance occurred
  was related by Holmberg and Christianson (2002)
  to police styles of suspect interviewing in cases
  of serious crime.
• They found a relationship between (later
  convicted) suspects recalled reactions about
  their interviews and their denial/admittance, in
  that those who said they had been frightened,
  stressed, insulted were less likely to have
  admitted.
• These researchers concluded that a dominant
  interviewing style is associated with suspects
  denying crime (p.42).
• In 2005 OConnor and Carson (both highly
  experienced professional interviewers) found that
  the predominant reason those imprisoned for child
  molestation gave for why they gave truthful
  accounts was the respect shown to them by the
  interviewers.

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6. A new approach

• In England and Wales in 1992 a new approach to
  the interviewing of suspects (and
  witnesses/victims) was developed and adopted
  nationally by the police service. This approach
  downplays the importance of the seeking of a
  confession and instead heavily emphasises the
  importance of gathering information from
  interviewees
• This still-evolving approach (called PEACE
  see Milne Bull 1999 for its details and
  extensive psychological underpinnings) has a
  strong emphasis on ethically encouraging suspects
  to talk, and only then questioning them (which
  includes pointing out contradictions/inconsistenci
  es in what they say and with other information
  gathered prior to the interview).
• In the light of recent research findings (e.g.
  Dando Bull, 2011 also see work by Granhag and
  by Hartwig) this challenging about
  contradictions (by using the gradual presentation
  of evidence/information) is now becoming a major
  emphasis in UK investigator/interviewer training,
  which is seeking to employ our GRIMACE approach.

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Our GRIMACE approach

• Our GRIMACE approach is for use in complex
  cases the interviewer in a planned way gradually
  lets the suspect know the relevant information
  the interviewer has available.
• It involves
• (i) Gathering Reliable Information/evidence
  before interviewing,
• (ii) Motivating a free recall Account from
  the suspects, and then
• (iii) during the open-ended questioning phase
  Challenging Effectively (i. e.
  gradually/incrementally) the suspect (using the
  information to point out contradictions etc.)
  about what the suspect has so far said.
• (One of the main reasons for our gradual
  revelation is that in complex cases the
  interviewer may well be aware of a considerable
  amount of possibly incriminating information and
  dealing with this one major topic at a time is
  likely to reduce the cognitive load for the
  interviewer but incrementally increase for the
  guilty suspect the realisation that (i) their
  contradictions/lies are being revealed and (ii)
  the information/evidence incriminating them is
  strengthening.)

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7. Some very new findings

• The data/findings to be presented as part of this
  symposium are drawn from a recently analysed set
  of contemporaneously tape recorded police
  interviews with 56 suspects regarding very
  serious crimes (e.g. murder, rape). (We are now
  beginning to write up this work for publication.)
• The interviews involved fairly recent cases that
  were no longer ongoing.
• Many of these interviews (discounting breaks
  within them) lasted several hours (some on
  consecutive days).
• Each audio-recording tape has a maximum duration
  of 45 minutes and thus 407 such tapes were
  analysed. (Only a few suspects did not want to
  have a legal advisor present.)
• Among the main issues our analysis has so far
  examined are (i) the strategies used by
  interviewers and (ii) the responses made by the
  suspects.

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8. Number of times each interviewer strategy was
used across all of the interviews with the 56
suspects

• Presentation of information/evidence
  8,713
• Challenges
  2,280
• Explicitly asks for account/tell truth
  338
• Rapport/empathy
  273
• Requests attention of suspect
  151
• Describes trauma of victim (or victims family)
  126
• Use of silence
  94
• Situational futility
  62
• Emphasises seriousness of offence
  57
• In the suspects interest to talk
  49
• Describes injuries of victim
  42
• Reiterates the caution
  33
• Gives the Special warning (relating to silence)
  21
• Maximisation
  01
• Minimisation
  00
• (See me later if you need a description of any of
  these tactics.)

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9. Interviewer strategies

• Thus we found that the strategies most frequently
  used were
• presentation of information,
• challenges,
• explicitly asking for an account/the truth,
• and rapport/empathy. (All of which are
  emphasised in the UK PEACE training.)
• Minimisation and maximisation (which the UK
  police are told not to use) never/almost never
  occurred (as also found in a different study
  see Bull and Soukara, 2010).

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10. For the two most frequently used
interviewer strategies, the mean frequencies of
use across the nine five-minute time segments per
tape were fairly constant.

• time Presentation of information
  Challenges
• 0 to 5 2.77
  0.44
• 5 to 10 3.62
  0.84
• 10 to 15 3.71
  0.88
• 15 to 20 3.53
  0.99
• 20 to 25 3.54
  1.05
• 25 to 30 3.68
  1.00
• 30 to 35 3.57
  1.16
• 35 to 40 3.22
  1.16
• 40 to 45 1.83
  0.59

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11. Suspects Responses

• Of the responses made by suspects, relevant
  responses were most frequent, with a mean
  frequency of 76 occurrences per tape.
• No comment responses were the second most
  frequent response, occurring on average 21 times
  per tape.
• It was rare for the suspect to challenge the
  interviewer or for the suspect to answer in an
  unclear or irrelevant manner.
• Complete silence was also quite rare with a mean
  frequency of six occurrences per tape.
• When each 45 minute tape was broken down into
  five-minute time segments, the distribution of
  the above types of suspects responses did not
  differ by time segment.

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12. Regression analysis was employed to examine
if any strategies were associated with suspects
responding relevantly

• Strategy and ß values R² .31 (p lt .001). p lt
  .05 plt.01 plt.001
• Positive associations
• Rapport/empathy .19
• Presentation of evidence .15
• Requests attention .13
• Negative associations
• Explicitly asks for account/tell truth -.27
• Emphasises seriousness of offence -.14
• Caution reiterated -.14
• Special warning -.13
• Situational futility -.10
• No association
• Use of silence .09
• Suspects interest to talk -.08
• Describe injuries .08
• Challenge .06

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13. Interview outcomes

• It was noted whether the 56 suspects admitted or
  denied these very serious offences.
• Most actively denied (64). (Active denials
  included those interviews where the suspect
  stayed silent or made/said no comment, but made
  denials via a prepared statement in interview -
  which either they or their legal advisor read
  out.)
• A further 13 neither admitted nor actively
  denied, (i.e. they merely said no comment or
  remained silent).
• Relatively few suspects fully (7 n 4) or
  partially admitted (16), typically fairly early
  on in their interviews.
• Given the few full admissions, no worthwhile
  analyses are possible in terms of which
  strategies may have been related to these (but
  see the special sample of shift from denial to
  admission interviews in Bull and Soukara, 2010).
• However, for the 56 suspects, the eventual case
  outcome was known to us for 49 of them, all of
  whom were convicted.

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14. End

• Despite the fact that most of these suspects
  seemed from the outset to be clear about their
  position (a) to deny or admit and (b) to either
  talk or not talk (the latter perhaps due to
  preceding legal advice), this did not deter the
  interviewers from continuing in these interviews
  to employ a range of strategies recommended in
  their (PEACE) training designed to encourage
  suspects to provide an account, which most
  suspects actually did.
• The PEACE training focuses on the gaining of
  information not confessions.
• The majority of suspects in this sample regarding
  serious offences were co-operative and provided
  relevant responses to questioning.
• Interviewers were more challenging to suspects in
  the present study than has been observed in our
  earlier studies (which have included suspects
  mostly in less serious cases and interviews
  recorded in earlier years than was the case for
  the present sample).

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References

• Alison, L., Sarangi, S., Wright, A. (2008).
  Human rights is not enough the need for
  demonstrating efficacy of an ethical approach to
  interviewing in India. Legal Criminological
  Psychology, 13, 89-106.
• Bull, R., Soukara, S. (2010). A set of
  studies of what really happens in police
  interviews with suspects. In G. D. Lassiter and
  C. Meissner (Eds.) Interrogations and
  confessions. Washington American
  Psychological Association.
• Dando, C., BULL, R. (2011). Maximising
  opportunities to detect verbal deception
  Training police officers to interview tactically.
  Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender
  Profiling, 8, 189-202.
• Gudjonnson, G. (2006). Sex offenders and
  confessions How to overcome their resistance
  during questioning. Journal of Clinical Forensic
  Medicine, 13, 203-207.
• Holmberg, U., Christianson, S-A. (2002).
  Murderers and sexual offenders experiences of
  police interviews and their inclination to admit
  or deny crimes. Behavioral Sciences and the Law,
  20, 31-45. 

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• Kebbell, M.R., Hurren, E.J., Mazerolle, P.
  (2006). Sex offenders' perceptions of how they
  were interviewed. Canadian Journal of Police
  Security Services, 4, 67-75.
• Kebbell, M.R., Alison, L.J., Hurren, E.J.
  (2008). Sex offenders' perceptions of the
  effectiveness and fairness of humanity,
  dominance, and understanding of cognitive
  distortions in police interviews A vignette
  study. Psychology, Crime and Law, 14, 435-449.
• Leahy-Harland, S. (2012). Police interviewing of
  serious crime suspects. Thesis submitted for the
  degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of
  Psychology at the University of Leicester.
• Milne, R., Bull, R. (1999). Investigative
  interviewing Psychology and practice.
  Chichester Wiley.
• OConnor, T., Carson, W. (2005). Understanding
  the psychology of child molesters A key to
  getting confessions. The Police Chief, 72,
  December, 1-7.
• St-Yves, M., Deslauriers-Varin, N. (2009). The
  psychology of suspects decision-making during
  interrogation. In R. Bull, T. Valentine, and T.
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