Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs

Law and Human Behavior, Aug 2007

By questionnaire, 631 police investigators reported on their interrogation beliefs and practices—the first such survey ever conducted. Overall, participants estimated that they were 77% accurate at truth and lie detection, that 81% of suspects waive Miranda rights, that the mean length of interrogation is 1.6 hours, and that they elicit self-incriminating statements from 68% of suspects, 4.78% from innocents. Overall, 81% felt that interrogations should be recorded. As for self-reported usage of various interrogation tactics, the most common were to physically isolate suspects, identify contradictions in suspects’ accounts, establish rapport, confront suspects with evidence of their guilt, and appeal to self-interests. Results were discussed for their consistency with prior research, policy implications, and methodological shortcomings.

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Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs

L. H. Colwell Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 0 C. A. Meissner University of Texas at El Paso , El Paso, TX 1 R. A. Leo University of San Francisco School of Law , San Francisco, CA 2 S. M. Kassin Williams College , Williamstown, MA 3 S. M. Kassin ( ) Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York , 445 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019-1199 4 K. D. Richman University of San Francisco, Department of Sociology , 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA By questionnaire, 631 police investigators reported on their interrogation beliefs and practicesthe first such survey ever conducted. Overall, participants estimated that they were 77% accurate at truth and lie detection, that 81% of suspects waive Miranda rights, that the mean length of interrogation is 1.6 hours, and that they elicit self-incriminating statements from 68% of suspects, 4.78% from innocents. Overall, 81% felt that interrogations should be recorded. As for self-reported usage of various interrogation tactics, the most common were to physically isolate suspects, identify contradictions in suspects' accounts, establish rapport, confront suspects with evidence of their guilt, and appeal to self-interests. Results were discussed for their consistency with prior research, policy implications, and methodological shortcomings. - Largely as a result of recent DNA exonerations, many of which had contained false confessions in evidence, a spotlight of scrutiny has been cast on the processes of police interviewing and interrogation. In recent years, a number of researchers have sought to systematically study various aspects of these processes (Kassin, 1997, Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004; Gudjonsson, 2003; Leo, 1996a; Ofshe & Leo, 1997). Now, however, a steady stream of false confession stories emanating from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and other major U.S. cities are inundating newspapers and television news media on a regular basis (see Drizin & Leo, 2004; Leo & Ofshe, 1998). Many of these stories recount horrific tales of psychologically and, in some cases, physically abusive interrogations of children and adults, including many who were cognitively impaired. While it is necessary to shed light on the problem, as research has done, it is also important to know the extent to which the cases that come to public light represent practices that are common or extraordinary. Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court lamented the relative absence of empirical information about what constituted common or routine police interrogation practices. In its landmark decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court wrote that, Interrogation still takes place in privacy. Privacy results in secrecy and this in turn results in a gap in our knowledge as to what in fact goes on in the interrogation room (p. 448). To fill this gap in its own analysis, this Court surveyed and critiqued then-existing police interrogation training manualsmost notably, Inbau and Reids (1962) Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, which is now in its fourth edition (Inbau, Reid, Buckley, & Jayne, 2001). Although the number of interrogation manuals and programs has increased over the last forty years (Leo, 2004), one cannot determine from them what constitutes common police practices. Since Miranda, researchers have used an array of methods to fill in this empirical gap. This literature is comprised of individual case studies (e.g., Gudjonsson & MacKeith, 1990), archival analyses of actual case documents (e.g., Leo & Ofshe, 1998; Drizin & Leo, 2004), observations of taped interrogations (e.g., Moston, Stephenson, & Williamson, 1992; Ofshe & Leo, 1997), retrospective self-reports of suspects (e.g., Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1999; Gudjonsson, 2006), and laboratory and field experiments (e.g., Kassin & Kiechel, 1996; Kassin, Meissner, & Norwick, 2005; Russano, Meissner, Narchet, & Kassin, 2005). In addition, a number of social scientists, journalists, and legal scholars have directly observed police practices inside the interrogation room (e.g., Corwin, 2003; Leo, 1996a; Simon, 1991; Skolnick, 1966; Wald Ayres, Hess, Schantz & Whitebread, 1967). As a result of this activity, there is now a substantial literature on various aspects of the psychology of police interrogations and confessions (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004; Gudjonsson, 2003). A number of issues have attracted attention in recent research. One concerns the extent to which law enforcement professionals can accurately distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements. Police investigators have confidence in their ability to make such judgments during a pre-interrogation interview, judgments that often determine whether they interrogate suspects or send them home. This confidence stems from some combination of on-the-job experience and law enforcement training programs that promise to increase judgment accuracy. For example, John E. Reid and Associates claims that (...truncated)


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Saul M. Kassin, Richard A. Leo, Christian A. Meissner. Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs, Law and Human Behavior, 2007, pp. 381-400, Volume 31, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s10979-006-9073-5