Developments in Investigative Interviewing

Investigative Interviewing

• Complex task that requires

  • Interpersonal skills to build rapport and trust

  • Skill to ask right questions at right time

  • Basic knowledge of human memory

  • Professional knowledge and competence

    • It’s not intuitive – it not easily learned on the job

    • It evolves via scientific enquiry and systematic evaluation of methods

• Maximizing likelihood of getting detailed account from cooperative interviewees

  • Interviewer responsible for getting detailed and reliable account

  • Issues can be addressed by interviewer

    • Building rapport

    • Provision of retrieval support (mental context reinstatement; memory compatible free report; non-leading cues/prompts)

    • Allowing sufficient time and ensuring appropriate conditions for retrieval

    • Setting expectations about level of reporting detail

    • Use of instructions to promote completeness and accuracy

    • Allowing the interviewee to have control of the report

Investigative Interviewing - Cooperation

• Investigators and witness working together to elicit accurate and detailed information

  • Cooperativeness = willingness to co-operate with investigative goals

  • Cooperativeness is key to get information

• Investigator rely on

  • Witness memory

  • Witness cooperation

• Cost benefit analysis of cooperation

  • Crime witnesses cooperation – series of decisions

    • Decision to report crime – evidence of under reporting

    • Decision to report remembered crime information in the interview

    • Decision to act as witness in court

• For information to be disclosed there has to be some positive elements of appraisal

• Some benefit to the disclosure that outweighs the cost of reporting

  • Witness disclosure of information results from positive subjective appraisal of benefits outweigh the costs of cooperation

  • Conversely high costs with no perceived benefits of cooperation negatively affects disclosure of information

  • Interviewing techniques have the potential to influence interviewee’s disclosure by reducing perceived costs and increasing benefits

Reluctant Witnesses

• Reluctant witnesses are witnesses who are reluctant to become involved in investigation process

  • Reluctant witness can remember but unwilling to give detailed statements

  • Incomplete witness reports due to motivational factors rather than cognitive limitations

• Prevalence of reluctant witness

  • 5-49% prevalence of reluctant witness reported by front-line police officers in England (Wheeler et al. 2017)

  • Criminal investigators from Netherlands, England and Sweden reported encountering uncooperative witnesses frequently (study)

  • Criminal investigator consider lack of cooperation an obstacle to information elicitation

  • Witnesses have civil duty but not legal obligation to cooperate in witness interviews

Reluctant Witnesses - Cooperation

• Lack of cooperation in interview

  • Witness unwilling to be involved in criminal investigation

    • Intimidated witness

    • Hostile toward police

    • Resistant to engage with system

    • Reluctant to talk

• Lack of cooperation looks like

  • Verbal

    • Unrelated topic

    • Providing some or well known information

    • Providing dame answer

    • Providing incomplete information

    • Minimistaion pleas

  • Passive verbal

    • Monosyllabic responding

    • Claiming lack of memory

    • Claiming lack of knowledge

  • Passive

    • Silence

    • Lack of engagement

  • Active avoidance

    • Using humour to deflect

    • Minimal responding

    • Challenging the question

    • Denying the information

    • Fabricating information

    • Handicapping excuses

Reluctant Witnesses - Ministry of Justice Guidance

• Establish reasons for witnesses reluctance

• Special measures for intimated witnesses

• Build rappot

• No pressure on witnesses to speak to police

• Records – notes or video

• Advice and supervision

Rapport

• Building Rapport

  • Interviews who build rapport have been found to gain more detailed and accurate memory reports

• What is rapport

  • Lots of definitions but they are describing the same thing

  • Feeling state of interest, positivity and balance in an interaction with another

  • Perception of having positive interaction, connection between two interactants

  • Working relationship between operator and source based on mutually shared understanding of goals and needs

  • Bond or connection between an investigative interviewer and interviewee

Rapport - Witness interviews

• Many different definitions of rapport and techniques but it’s agreed that it important to conduct effective interviews

• Interviewers who make an effort to develop rapport elicit significantly more detailed and accurate memory reports from witness

• Rapport refers to ‘quality of the interviewer-interviewee interpersonal interaction

Rapport Building Techniques

• Verbal

  • Active listening

  • Showing personal interest

  • Reciprocity

  • Self-disclosure – stating you understand their experience (trying to understand the situation their in)

  • Empathetic responses

  • Use of interviewee’s name

• Non-verbal

  • Smiling

  • Head-nodding

  • Eye-contact

  • Open body language

• Para-verbal

  • Tone of voice

Self-administered interview

• Obtaining detailed initial accounts at the scene of an incident or shortly after

• Large number of witnesses at a crime

  • Identify key witness and prioritized for interview

  • What about the others?

  • Multiple (cooperative) witnesses; not always clear who has relevant information; challenges prioritising

    • Limited resources = delay before interview

    • In this period memory is

      • Prone to forgetting

      • Prone to distortion or error

SAI Content

• Explicit about what is expected from witnesses

• Instructions and questions that provide retrieval support

• Core mnemonic components from Cognitive Interview:

  • Mental Reinstatement of Context instructions

    • Recall is best when encoding and retrieval environment is the same

  • Report Everything instructions

    • Open ended report

    • Encourages reporting without editing

    • Includes warning against guessing

• Non-leading cues and prompts

• Repeated warning about guessing

• Emphasis on providing accurate information

  • Sketch prompt

  • Other people or vehicles present

  • Witnessing conditions

• Distance

• Time spent encoding

• Obstruction

• Lighting

• Weather

SAI - Findings

• Empirical Research

  • Since 2006 the accuracy of this has been tested

  • It been translated into at least 15 different languages

• Overview of key findings

  • Community-based volunteers understand what was required in their reports and follow the SAI instructions

  • The SAI instructions produce significantly more correct information than a standard recall instruction – at equivalent accuracy rate

  • Completing an SAI after witnessing a (mock) crime:

    • Reduces forgetting over a delay

    • Maintains high accuracy rates

    • Preserves descriptive details

    • Protects against memory distortions caused by exposure to misleading questions and erroneous post event information

    • Enhances performance in a subsequent Cognitive Interview

SAI - Case Studies

• 8 key witnesses

• But also load of other witnesses

• 88% of selected witnesses completed an SAI

  • Of these:

    • All witnesses gave a detailed free recall account of the incident (average of 54 lines of text / 2.5 A4 pages of info.)

    • In addition, most witnesses completed all other relevant sections of the SAI, providing information about:

      • Perpetrators’ actions & descriptions

      • The quality of their own view/testimony

      • Other potential witnesses who had been present

    • 5 witnesses provided a sketch, appended with descriptors

  • SAI identified three additional important witnesses

  • SAI allowed for extra charges to be brought

Timeline Technique

• Extracting information about ‘who did what and when?’ in extended interviews or security debriefings

  • Better account at linking people to action if multiple people were present ‘I was there but didn’t do anything’

• What is it

  • Initial reporting process to maximise memory

  • A self-administered technique designed to optimize an interviewee’s ability to

    • recall and report a particular time period in sequence

    • identify individuals involved

    • link those individuals with specific actions

  • Uses a ‘timeline’ of the relevant time period to provide a structure for remembering and reporting

  • Can be used to facilitate a comprehensive (initial) download’ of information for time periods of interest

Timeline Technique

• Adaptability of ‘timeline’ approaches

  • Common ‘sense-making’ tool in investigation

    • timeline

  • Common technique in autobiographical memory research

  • Historical ‘timeline’ and calendar techniques (EHC) increasingly used technique in social and medial surveys

  • For autobiographical information, timeline formats enhance recall accuracy

    • Particularly when recall task is difficult

• How does timeline approach assist retrieval

  • Memory search theories highlight the important role of temporal context for memory

    • Retrieval process is guided by internal context representation, produces organisation effects

    • Temporal-contextual cues play an important role in retrieval processes

      • Episodic memory systems stores information about temporally dated episodes or events

    • Evidence for temporal clustering of information

    • Allow people to write things down and put it where it fits on the timeline rather than trying to remember things in order and forgetting certain things that spring to mind

• Reporting of complex multiple perpetrator events

  • Timeline technique helps reporting more correct information about who did what and when

    • Without externally generated memory cue or prompts

  • Enhanced reporting of group conversations

What does SAI and timeline technique offer investigators

• Standardised multi-purpose reporting approach, flexible across a range of operational scenarios

  • SAI: major incidents, public order, road collisions

  • Timeline: extended or complex events involving multiple people or time periods

• Cooperative witnesses can provide initial accounts efficiently – without being led by interviewer

• Elicits relevant information with high levels of detail/accuracy

• Facilitates the effective prioritisation of witnesses and/or interviewee topics

• Can be used in combination with other good practice techniques (e.g. Cognitive Interview)