Interrogative Prerogatives: A Content Analysis of Police Policies on School-Based Interviews and Interrogations

ABSTRACT

Children increasingly interact with police on school grounds. Most research on police in schools focuses on school safety. However, police also question children at school as witnesses, suspects, and victims during a criminal investigation. The current study explores police policies about interviewing and interrogating children at school. We explored how many of the police departments of the largest 100 U.S. cities had policies related to questioning children at school and analyzed the content of these policies. We found that 40% of police departments had a policy of school-based questioning. These policies rarely covered issues related to students’ legal rights and largely focused on adult-related issues like notification of the child’s parent and permission of school officials.

KEYWORDS:

• Juvenile interrogations
• school-based interrogations
• school-based interviews

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2023.2299990

Notes

1. We use the term children here to refer to students attending U.S. schools in grades K-12. Children typically enter kindergarten in the U.S. at age 5 or 6 (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). Our definition of children includes all students attending elementary, middle, or high school so long as they are under the age of 18.

2. We use the term questioning here to refer to a combination of both police interviews (generally a more information-gathering questioning practice) and police interrogations (generally a more confession-oriented questioning practice; Hess, 2010). There are important differences in officers’ approach to these two questioning styles and differing legal protections for interviews and custodial interrogations. However, for the purposes of our study, we are primarily interested in policies about police asking questions to children related to criminal activity and so combine these similar, although distinct, practices here.

3. Many school-based police fall under the community’s municipal police department. We use the term municipal police to refer to police officers who primarily serve the larger community and who are not specifically stationed full- or part-time at a school.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Leigh Greenspan

Rachel Leigh Greenspan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Legal Studies at the University of Mississippi. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Behavior from the University of California, Irvine and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Her research interests focus on the intersection of psychology and the law exploring the development and downstream consequences of memory errors, particularly in the criminal justice system.

Abigail Novak

Abigail Novak is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Legal Studies at the University of Mississippi. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of Florida. Her research interests include children and punishment, systems and delinquency, early-onset antisocial behavior, and applied quantitative methodologies.

Remy Heinen

Remy Heinen is a current MCJ student at the University of Mississippi. She received her B.A. in Spanish and her B.S. in Criminal Justice from the University of Mississippi in 2022. Her research interests include sexual violence and violence against women.