Co-occurrences among interrogation tactics in actual criminal investigations

ABSTRACT

During police interrogations, trained investigators may use different tactics to elicit information from criminal suspects. Through this exploratory research, we investigated which tactics were used most frequently by investigators in actual police interrogations and how they used tactics in combination. We coded 50 videotaped interrogations recorded in North America for 25 unique tactics as they were used by investigators. We divided each interrogation into 3-minute time blocks, counted the tactics that were used within each time block, and conducted a principal component analysis on those frequencies. We expected our analyses to reveal patterns of tactic use but had no a priori hypotheses about how investigators would combine and sequence interrogation tactics. Presenting evidence was the most common tactic, and investigators used minimization more than maximization tactics. The tactics grouped into seven components, indicating that they had been used by investigators within the same time blocks. Post hoc examination of those components revealed that tactics used in temporal proximity shared logical connections and segued into one another to form multifaceted persuasive messages. For instance, making accusations and increasing suspects’ guilt were often employed before offering justifications. This research provides insight into how interrogation tactics relate to one another during police interrogations.

KEYWORDS:

• Interrogation tactics
• interrogation strategies
• interrogation observation
• suspect questioning
• suspect interviews

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Richard Leo and Susan Bahns for providing research materials

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To investigate whether country impacted our analyses, we divided the interrogations by country and conducted a series of t tests on the interrogation tactics and the components identified through our PCA. Despite lacking power, a small number of statistically significant differences were observed. American investigators were more likely than Canadian investigators to employ the Internal Pressure component (t = 2.601, p = .002), to appeal to self-interest (t = 5.291, p < .001), and to accuse suspects of lying (t = 3.253, p = .002). No other significant differences in components or tactics were found.

2 Thirty of the interrogation videos had lengths-in-minutes not divisible by three, resulting in the final time blocks associated with these interrogations representing periods shorter than three minutes. Twenty-three of these shorter time blocks were ultimately removed due to no tactics occurring within those periods.