Empathy in investigative interviews of victims:How to understand it, how to measure it, and how to do it?

ABSTRACT

In the literature and in modern training programmes, empathy is considered important for the process of building rapport. Yet there is no distinct definition of empathy in the context of the police interview, and how to display empathy is poorly operationalized. In addition, there have been different attempts to measure empathy. The aim of the current study is to explore how detectives display empathy through the observation of four video-recorded police interviews of traumatized young victims of the 2011 Utøya terror attack in Norway and research interviews with the detectives who conducted the police interviews. The detectives demonstrated understanding and interest, and empathy was displayed both verbally and non-verbally. Furthermore, the interviews were characterized by cooperation. Due to the lack of consensus on empathy in police interviews, the study raises the question of what kind of empathy should be displayed in police interviews and whether empathy should be replaced with more appropriate concepts in police training.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• police interviews
• victims
• contact with police

Acknowledgement

I thank Åse Langballe and the National Knowledge Center on Violence and Traumatic Stress who have given me access to data collected through the Utøya-study. The Utøya- study has been financed by the Norwegian Directorate of Health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The word KREATIV is a Norwegian acronym that represents the values on which it is based: communication, rule of law, ethics and empathy, awareness, transparency, information, and scientifically based principles (Rachlew & Fahsing, 2015).

2. The quote is from unpublished learning material used at KREATIV training courses.

3. Not all of the other victims were negative. It was, however, not possible to extract how they perceived they had been interviewed since the research interviews were very brief, and the victims described the police interview more or less by saying it was ‘okay’.

4. In contrast to several English-speaking countries, the police in Norway are not required to communicate a scripted version of the rights.

5. Advice on how to do this is described in Reid’s nine steps of interrogation (Inbau, Reid, Buckley, & Jayne, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Norwegian Police University College.