Transcript

Børge Hansen 

Good morning, Becky. And good morning, everyone. I’m in Luton in the Davidhorn office in Luton. And today I’m here with Becky Milne, Professor of Forensic Psychology from the University of Portsmouth. Becky, you want to give a brief introduction about yourself?  

Becky Milne 

Yeah. Thank you very much for inviting me for this wonderful podcast talking about how we’ve evolved over time from sort of interrogation to investigative interviewing. So I’ve been working in this arena for over 30 years. I know I can’t believe time flies.  

Børge Hansen 

It does fly for over 30 years.  

Becky Milne 

So I started out, you know, actually I do inspirational talks for students school children who were doing their sort of higher exams because I wanted to be an optician. Okay. I know I wanted to be an optician and I’m lucky I didn’t get my grades. This is what I say. We are lucky. That’s what I say to people please don’t stress you know and in the days where I was applying for university to be an optician you either went to university or you went in the polytechnic. That was almost like your backup plan and my backup plan was psychology because it was this new sort of science it wasn’t everywhere like it is now and so luckily I didn’t get my grades and I ended up going to Portsmouth. And the reason I went to Portsmouth is because I wanted to do a year out and I worked as an aid worker over in Ethiopia working it was in the famine at the time in the 1980s.  

So I had my 19th birthday over in Addis. And I just wanted to give something to the world before I went on my own ventures of academia. And Portsmouth, Polly, were the only people who said, send us a postcard. Everyone else said, no, you’ll have to reapply, but Portsmouth said, send us a postcard. So, you know, I am all about fate in life. I’m serendipity. I mean, I enjoyed my time in Addis. learnt a lot. I grew up, learnt about famine, about war, and you’ll see how that comes back later.  

Børge Hansen 

So the story starts in Addis Ababa, basically you sent off with some values in baggage.  

Becky Milne 

Yeah, working with various charities to try and get money really for people who were dying. 

So I wasn’t sort of out in the country. I was in the capital city.  

Børge Hansen 

Yeah, coming out of UK into all this Adis Abbaba it’s a remote location, different world.  

Becky Milne 

Yeah. Different world. what happened there that, you know, that you on the, this path on forensic psychology there. Well, interestingly also, so I experienced that. I experienced famine, death. Saw my first dead body sort of 18 going on 19. But prior to that, someone else had asked me this recently, and I wrote a blog about this, that my parents, unfortunately, as you know, passed away, both of them now within the last sort of four or five years. And my mum was a woman’s activist. So she was all about women’s rights. We traveled a lot as a family. And one of my trips was to New York. 

And people always go to New York. They go to the typical tourist traps. You know, they go to the Empire State Building, et cetera. My parents took me to the UN building. And when people say they’re taking their children to New York, I said, is the UN building on your list? Because it should be. Because yes, all the other tourist traps that everyone does were exciting and wonderful. But the thing at the age of about 14 that really hit me was the UN.  

Yeah, with that wonderful sculpture outside of the gun, which was all twisted. With just the ideology of the UN. And that really hit me hard as a sort of a teenager, thinking, this is amazing that, I had to use my passport. I remember I had to, because it was a different country, but I’m in US. 

And all these things and what it stood for, what the UN stood for really hit my heart. So I took my son as well at the age of 14, because you have to book your place. You get taken around by someone who works with the United Nations and they explain about social justice. They say about all the values of the United Nations. And that carved my path that I wanted to do something for society. I wanted to do good and I wanted to help.  

Børge Hansen 

And this was way before we had the, you know, 17 sustainability goals. So now it’s more easy to access this for everyone. And it’s been a part of the agenda for many organizations and government around the world. The UN manual for criminal investigations is being launched today. 

Becky Milne 

I know. And that is almost like a full circle. the new rapporteur, Alice, invited me to do some of the opening remarks about three or four weeks ago regarding how we can sort of cope with females primarily who have been violated as part of war conflict. 

And it’s almost like my circle has come round from being inspired by the UN and my mum, women’s activist, to suddenly doing a lot more work that I’m doing with the UN on war crimes, et cetera. And I feel very blessed that, in fact, my passion, my passion is getting, everyone a voice, whoever they are, to give them a voice, to let them be heard, is really coming to fruition. 

So it’s, yeah, that was my motivation was going to the UN building.  

Børge Hansen 

Oh, it’s good start. So tell me, so there’s a leap from visiting the UN building to, you know, in 1999, you and Ray Bull wrote one of the first, maybe the first book on Investigative Interviewing and coincidentally, the manual is released today, and it talks a lot about the Investigative Interviewing. What led you to come together and what inspired you guys to write this book and talk about that a little bit.  

Becky Milne 

I feel very, very, I keep saying this, but I do feel very privileged, the people I’ve worked with over the years. So didn’t get my grades. So I ended up going to Portsmouth Polytechnic and Ray Bull came as head of department in my year two. 

And he was a breath of fresh air. He was very different to a normal academic was Ray. We both come from sort of quite working class backgrounds. Both of us are first in our families to do a degree. And I started working on my dissertation. 

As you know, I call him dad number two, you know, and he is like my dad number two. I did my undergrad dissertation with him on facial disfigurement and people’s perceptions of children with facial disfigurement. So very different to obviously forensic interviewing. And then he had a PhD place and I was very lucky, right place, right time. 

What he said to me, I was, you know, relatively bright. You know, I wasn’t getting first but he picked me because he knew I’d be able to talk to cops and I’d be able to interact with practitioners.  

Børge Hansen 

Already here, you can see that the, you know, interacting with other humans is a key.  

Becky Milne 

Yeah, for me, it always has been. So, and justice for everyone regardless. So, yeah, so I started my PhD with Ray and we started looking at, he had just written the first ever guidance in the world for interviewing vulnerable groups called the Memorandum of Good Practice. And everything that was written was based on some form of research base. Now we all call it evidence-based policing, but that didn’t exist then.  

We always, as psychologists, everything we advise at a local or a national or an international level has to be based on research. That’s exactly what that manual being launched today represents. 

But Ray drilled that into me back in 1992. That’s when I started my PhD with Ray. And he’d just written this national guidance. And there was very limited research to base any guidance on and how to interview vulnerable groups, uber vulnerable children with learning disabilities and adults with learning disability. And so that was my focus of my research for five years. But within the first year, I said, I need to find out what police do.  

If I’m gonna be researching the police for the next three years full time, then I need to find out what they did. So the local police, and back in 92, it was quite closed. It wasn’t now quite an open organisation, the police in the UK, but in the early 90s, it was quite a closed organisation. And the local police, called Dorset Police, opened their arms and said, yeah, come and view, just come and observe what we do with child protection cases.  

And I learnt a lot. And then also I was very lucky. I went over to LA to work with Ed Geiselman in the lab with Ed, because I was going to research this thing called the cognitive interview. And in those days to be able to research it, you had to be trained by the person who created it. So I worked with Ed in his lab and I was like a kid in a sweet shop and I met the local police officer, someone called Rick Tab who asked Ed and Ron, how can we interview people properly?  

And that taught me really early, back in 92, it really taught me that it has to be a collaboration. So I met with Rick to find out why he’d approached his local university to try and come up with some interviewing models help when he interviews witnesses and victims on major crime. Cause he said there was stuff left in the head, but he didn’t know how to access it without tramping on the snow, contaminating the snow.  

So I learned very early from the police themselves, Dorset police, and then working with Ed and meeting the LAPD that this has to be a collaboration. It can’t be just one sided. It’s a real-world problem.  

Børge Hansen 

Yeah. How was it back then? You know, because you said that there was no real science back then. Now we know that, you know, science back research is good for building methods. You know, some of the stories we get is that back then you need to be either you were a people person or you weren’t. Yeah. So if you didn’t manage to connect well with people intuitively, and then how was the, you know, perception of building science to this? And also, well, it’s just understanding how science can help.  

Becky Milne 

I think as an academic, I like to call myself an acca-pracca, an academic – practitioner, because as you know, I work on many a case. 

As an academic at that time, I didn’t know much about the practitioner world in the early days. And that’s why I invite all academics to learn that practitioner roles, they can become more of an acca-pracca to, you know, I see a lot of research, which to be honest would never work in the field. So it’s obviously they haven’t had any dialogue with what the real world problems are. And so that’s why I immersed myself. I, you know, I just stayed in someone’s house, you know, and she was in child protection, her husband was in CID. And I just made tea, coffee, did filing cabinets just to find out what the real-world problems were and how psychology can help their world. And there was a case with vulnerable adults that Ray Bull was asked to advise on. A large number of adults had been allegedly at that time abused physically, emotionally, sexually within a care home situation. And the force, Thames Valley police asked Ray to give advice. And that was my first time working actually on a case, but obviously just helping Ray. And I learned how difficult the job is. So yes, we can be critical. I am a critical friend. That’s what the police call me. 

However, I learned what a difficult job it was in my first year of my PhD. And the police on the whole are desperate for help in certain difficult cases. I was very lucky that I, you know, I have been most of the time, not always, but most of the time embraced across the globe asking for my help and Ray’s help, you know, and that’s all we can be is help. We can’t give them the magic wand, but we can be there to help and give advice. So I learnt a lot about my God, how difficult it is to get accurate or reliable information from a vulnerable person to make an informed decision. And that’s basically my world. My world is I work with decision makers, be they judges, prosecutors, be they police officers who make a decision. And we know decisions are only as good, and people have heard me say this so many times, information is only as good as the questions. Poor questions results in poor information, results in poor ill-informed, worst case scenario miscarriages or justice decisions. And it’s as simple as that really. And that’s what’s working on that case and that getting that inaccurate information is hard.  

So I learned very early that collaboration is needed. We need to find the gap. We need to understand the difficulty in the workplace. We need to then look at how we as psychologists, and obviously now other disciplines, but me as a psychologist can try and help fill that gap and help the people and be critical, of course, because part of the way is you have to be critical, but in a way that doesn’t put up barriers, you always come up with solutions if possible.  

Børge Hansen 

So you guys in 1999, you put all these learnings into a book.  

Becky Milne 

Yeah. Well, in 92, that’s when I started my PhD and 92 is the real year. Everything happened in the UK in 92. Peace was born in 92. I started my PhD in 92. Ray wrote the National Guide with someone called Di Burch, a lawyer, of how to interview vulnerable groups in 92. So everything stemmed from that year 92. And I was very lucky. was on the fringes, because I was learning of that world. All these people were working together, And I got my PhD in 97. And then I was asked to write, so I got my doctorate in 97. But interesting, in 95, that’s why it took me a bit longer, I was asked to be a lecturer in the Institute of Police and Criminological Studies, it was called then, we’ve now gone through two name changes. And it was the first ever police degree in the world. So this also was important. So I have always immersed myself in working with the practitioners. So then as my first ever academic job, it wasn’t the straight from school type of student, it was police officers and police officers who I love working with, were also very challenging to me going, well, we’re paying for this degree or someone is paying for this degree and time. Why are we learning all this? So they made me as a psychologist go, why am I teaching them stress management? Why am I teaching? So it made me have to really conform all my knowledge to their world, not just interviewing, everything. And I led that degree for over eight years and we had people from all over the world. Initially it was just Metropolitan Police, then it went national, then it went international. And so my academic sort of admin role, my teaching role, my PhD has always immersed me of dealing straight with a practitioner. Luckily, I’d say, because I’ve had to learn to go, yeah, what’s the point? Why are we doing this? You know, everyone always says that. Becky always says, what’s the point? Conferences and that what’s the point?  

Børge Hansen 

You’re that annoying person asking those hard questions.  

Becky Milne 

Well, I just say what, how are going to, how are we going to realize this in the real world? How is this workable?  

Børge Hansen 

Yeah, I love it because it is key because it’s sometimes, you know, academic, academia can work with topics that might, you know, hard to relate to practical situations. our, you know, police officers are practical people. They have practical problems to solve. 

Becky Milne 

And now luckily, we have this impact agenda in our research exercise. So suddenly I became the annoying person of going, she’s very applied. Yeah. And I work my research is in what we call the sort of very messy data world, which is difficult to publish because you can’t control everything to suddenly being flavor of the month, to be honest, because suddenly, my God, Becky actually does work in the real world and says that really difficult question. I’ve always said it. What’s the point. And, know, we now call it sort of impact is that the buzzword, what’s the impact? What’s the impact? And that’s what lied the book. 

And that book helped me broaden my horizons from vulnerable victims and witnesses to more suspects. I wrote a chapter on conversation management. It was an authored book. 

Børge Hansen 

Just recently, somebody recommended this book. Now, 25 years later. So why do you think that’s the case, that it’s still relevant? And also what do you see has changed in the world? I mean, 25 years, you know, sciences evolved, the practitioners evolved. What do you see changing in the world now?  

Becky Milne 

I know, with 25 years is a long time, huh? And things have changed and some things haven’t, which isn’t great either. 

You know, I sometimes think, I’ve been dedicating 30 years of my life to this. You know, why? So what has stayed the same is a lot of the models have stayed the same, but they just have developed. And the reason why I think people still recommend it, because Ray and I, at the outset, back to that collaboration, wanted it not to be this really high brow academic book. We wanted something that practitioners can pick up and use. And that was really important for us. But my PhD students, majority of them have been practitioners. They learn a little bit from me and I learn a lot from them. And they have also helped me understand their world with their own research. And that’s been very important. So at the time I had Colin Clark, who was my first PhD baby. I had Andy Griffiths and they obviously were practitioners. 

And so I learned a lot from them. And so they also looked, you know, taught me how to try and put what we needed across so practitioners could pick it up. And that’s what was really important. And Tom Williamson, as you know, who led the whole initiative of investigative interviewing in the UK, he organized a conference in Paris. And every European country were asked to talk about what their interviewing stance was. It was many moons ago. And the only country that took academics was the UK and that was Ray and I. And it was quite embarrassing in a way because most countries just said, we’ve got this book and it was our book. And that wasn’t because it was so brilliant. It was because there was nothing else. So a lot of countries utilize that book because that’s all they had. They could see the tide turning from this sort of very narrow minded interrogation stance within Europe to more an open minded, ethical, effective interviewing model. They can see that tide turning. And that’s what’s changed in 25 years within the suspect world is a real shift, but not all countries as we know.  

Børge Hansen 

Exactly. So, you know, we’ve already talked to Ivar Falsing and Asbjørn Rachlew, they took their inspiration out of some of early work from the UK into Norway. And then there is spreading around to some parts of the world, but not everywhere. Why do think that is? You know, it’s not picked up by everyone. 

Becky Milne 

It’s not picked up by everyone. I think some countries just don’t know that it exists. So I think it’s a lack of understanding that there is this whole new world. You know, I go around the world talking to various countries as does Ivar and Asbjørn. And sometimes we all do it together, which is great fun, as you can imagine. And so I think some countries are just enlightened. You know, this whole new world has opened up. 

However, it is a hard change because changing is not just changing the model. It’s not just changing training packages. It’s training, changing mindsets and trying to change the hearts and minds and the mindsets. It’s a big ship to turn.  

Børge Hansen 

Would you say it’s counterintuitive from a human nature point of view in when we talk with other people? It seemed to me that we so often get into a bias or confirmation bias. We think we have a solve the thing. As humans, we want to jump to conclusions because that’s easiest.  

Becky Milne 

We like to be right. And human beings like to be right. There’s a number of things going on, I think, within the world of investigation and interviewing. I think, first of all, if you look at communication, the basic communication skills, of course, there are cultural differences on top, but basic memory, basic communication that our everyday conversation skills is we overtalk, we interrupt, we’ve both done that with each other because we get on and we know each other, Børge, and therefore we have rapport, right? And we know rapport is the heart of good interviewing. And if you use your everyday conversational skills, which is using leading questions, closed questions, in fact, if I said to you know, did you have a good holiday? You know, and I know that I don’t want “War and peace”. You know, I just want: “Yes, it was great”. You know, these conversational rules, these basic conversational rules do not fit in an investigative interviewing context. That’s the problem. So in the investigative interviewing world, we need police officers to be open, open with regarding their conversational skills, you know, allowing people to run for 45, 50 hours. 

In the, you know, the adult witness world, which is not, it’s not a conversation. We said it was a conversation of purpose. It’s actually not, you know, in the adult witness world, primarily it’s a one way flow, which goes against all our rules and regulations. So there’s a whole problem of it’s actually going against the curve of everyday conversation. So therefore we need good training. We also need techniques for the police such as the cognitive interview, that’s what it’s all about, to explain to general public to basically go against their everyday conversational rules. But because we’re teaching police officers to go against it, they then have to also have a lot of refresher training. So that’s costly. So you’ve got that going on. And we know work that Laurence Alison’s also done. We all know that to get transference into the workplace, you need a lot of practice, practice, practice in small groups. So it costs money, time, energy, you know, it’s very costly. It’s not easy and it’s costly. Yeah. So that’s the one side. The other side is your decision-making. And so the more the brain is overloaded, the more the brain will use shortcuts. Now we just talked about that interviewing is very difficult. So you have that real cognitive overload of the brain and the more it’s overloaded, therefore the more likely you’re gonna be biased. And that’s where your world hits technology. And that’s where tech should be able to free up some of that cognitive load of an interviewer. 

And you know, someone says, what is, you know, when we do gigs in new countries, you know, what is the one thing you should change? And I say, start recording. Yeah. Start using technology. Not only for transparency in the process and therefore you can make sure it is fair, et cetera, and human rights angle, but from a psychologist perspective to free up the cognitive load of the interview. And that’s key. 

You know, and we can understand then what’s happened in that interaction. So we can then see what’s going wrong. We can then feed that into training. There’s a whole range of reasons that why we need to record. And for me, that’s your first message. Just start recording these interactions. And the majority of countries around the world do not. And that is scary. We’ve done it since 1984 with our suspect interviews. It’s more complicated with our witness interviews in the UK. 

Børge Hansen 

But that brings me on another topic, which I think is near and dear to you. There’s disciplines around, you know, suspect interviews and how you work on that. But you’ve chosen vulnerable witnesses as your primary focus, at least lately. Why did you go that route?  

Becky Milne 

And one, that was my PhD with Ray, actually. That’s where I started with children. But also I’ve done a lot of work more recently with adults in terror attacks. I’ve worked as an advisor to the United Kingdom counter-terrorism team on terror attacks since 2017 and other cases. And I’ve also been part of giving advice to war crimes teams across the globe. And so one key question is what is vulnerability? We keep using this I mean, there is no universal definition of vulnerability. It’s really difficult. I mean, that’s a PhD in itself. What is vulnerability? So for me, when we start looking at that big question of what vulnerability is, you know, have what we call internal vulnerability, who you are. So, you know, when you say to the general public who’s vulnerable, of course they’ll say children, older adults, people, you know, have some form of mental disorder, you know, they’re the internal vulnerabilities. 

So of course we need to, and we know the model of interviewing and to get accurate reliable information from people within that sphere, we have to be even more careful of how we gather that information to make informed decisions. And therefore it has to be a transparent process. And we’ve had that with our children since 1989 in the UK. That’s key. But then you also have external vulnerability. So that is the circumstance you might have been thrown into, whether that’s a sexual offense, and that is something I’m really focusing on at the moment, or whether that is because of a terror attack. And merrily, you’re not targeted wrong place, wrong time, but you’re still part of a trauma or even a disaster, right? So trauma externally will still impact. And our emergency responders themselves are part of that. And for me, one of my students worked looking at how we responded to the terror attack in Norway. Patrick Risen’s work looked at how the police officers managed trauma and his amazing work was fed straight into the work of the United Kingdom counterterrorism. It’s country to country learning, it’s amazing. And they even read some of his papers before they did some of their interviews. I mean, that’s impact, know, learning from, you know, an awful situation, from one author to another. And I’m going over to Australia actually in August and they’ve obviously just had one, haven’t they?  

And so it looks like I might be having meetings about what we’ve created here. It’s called WISCI. I tried to put gin in there Børge, but no. And when I saw you in London, we’d just been selling WISCI to the Irish and the Irish embassy. And WISCI is a framework which is witness, interview strategies for critical incidents. It’s the start of how to triage mass witnesses.  

And so for me, vulnerability comes from a whole host of internal and external factors and the balance in all these cases, whether it’s a victim of war crimes, whether it’s a sexual offense victim, our investigation of sexual offenses in the UK is not great. 

You know, I think the last figure was around 2%, you know, and we’ve luckily had someone called Betsy Stanko, an amazing professor leading this Operation Soteria which has been a massive, massive initiative in the UK with lots of wonderful people working on it, all trying to increase the investigation of sexual offences in the UK. I’ve had a little part of that by working with Patrick Tidmarsh, and we’ve been morphing the whole story approach that he works with the ECI, the Enhanced Cognitive Interview, and we have just come up with a new model of interviewing together, collective, both of us, and of how to interview sexual offence victims to try and improve that balance between getting accurate, reliable information to make an informed decision, but in a trauma -informed approach. And that balance is really difficult sometimes to forge. You’re dealing with psychological complex matters.  

Børge Hansen 

So how do you train people? in the UK you call this achieving best evidence, right?  

Becky Milne 

We do. I’ve been part of, yeah, achieving best evidence is based on research. It’s been written over the years by a multitude of people. 

Initially was Ray, Ray wrote the memorandum of practice, which is just for children and child abuse cases. And then there was a big campaign and it was a speaking up for justice report saying why just children allowed a visual recording interview or evidence in chief. And that widened the loop to have people with learning disability, mental disorder, physical disability and children up to the age of 18 allowed a visually recorded interview as their evidence in chief. 

And that was a real big important initiative. But suddenly it’s like, whoa, these interviews are open to public scrutiny. These interviews are high. They need people are highly skilled. And hence my PhD was starting to look at that world. And it’s, it’s a difficult task because you’ve got trauma, you’ve got vulnerability. And also even today, you know, there’s discussion in the UK about what this visually recorded interview should look like. 

And I know not everyone’s happy with that product. And the reason why not everyone’s happy is this product, which is one product. So you basically interview a vulnerable group and that is their evidence in chief in our courts. That product has to serve a multitude of needs. And I put this to people the other day and they said, right, need to write that down. And this is again, it’s finding this balance of, so first of all, this product, yeah, which we obviously record, has to serve the memory need. And what I mean the memory need, the model that elicits it, which is in achieving best evidence, has to have accurate, reliable information to make an informed decision. And we know through lab research and lots of research, I’m an expert witness, that if you follow this model, you’re going to get reliable information, which we can make an informed decision on. So this product has to serve the memory need. It also has to serve the victim need, has to be a way that we don’t ransack people’s memories and re-traumatize them. So it has to be trauma informed. Okay. So these are two things and that’s primarily what achieving best evidence focused on the memory and the trauma.  

And the trauma has come over time when we’ve learned more and more about what trauma is and how to approach it. Then it also has to serve the police needs. Police officers are decision makers. So, and they’re also gatekeepers. So it has to serve a police decision -making need. Then we have our Crown Prosecution Service in the UK. It has to serve their need and their need as decision-makers prior to court. Do we take it to court or not? 

But also if they decide that they should go to a court, it then has to serve as something that CPS believes is a good product for them. This is where the disconnect is, has been, and it’s not solved, but then it also has to serve a jury needs in the UK. There’s a lot going into this bag here now, right? In this one interview. 

You know, and can we have a one size fits all approach? I think we can, but it’s difficult. But also we’ve got to think about is at the moment, people don’t understand each other’s roles. So people seem to be just shifting blame may be the wrong word, but people who are debating what this should look at are looking: well, me as a prosecutor need this, right? Please go me as a police officer need this without actually thinking about that this product needs to serve a multitude of people. Let’s look at everyone’s viewpoint.  

Børge Hansen 

Proper training, understanding of the various stakeholders, but also proper preparations.  

Becky Milne 

Planning and prep, of course, Børge and it all comes down to planning and prep and needs assessment of the individual. The victim and the case and where we’re going with it is really key because as we keep saying, it’s a bloody difficult task. And what’s scary is most people around the world aren’t trained to do it. Which is scary.  

Børge Hansen 

How do we change the world?  

Becky Milne 

Luckily, we have the COST project. And with the Implemendez as work going on, which most of us are involved in, Dave Walsh is spearheading that very admirably. And I think there are now up to 47 countries involved in implementing the Mendez principles, you know, that is all about the international change, you know, from, and this is, know, when I work with countries, they normally ask me these two things. How can we get open-minded investigators who are competent communicators? And most countries want to have a justice system that service that need, whether it’s the prosecutors are doing most of the interviews that happens in some countries. I’ve got a judge, Mara, she’s a Brazilian judge working with me and she makes judicial decisions. So her PhD is looking at how do we make effective judicial decisions in her Brazilian justice system, again, with child interviews. So it’s really important, I think for us to look at each country in context because each country will have different issues too. They can learn from us in the UK and hopefully overcome 10 years by not going down that rabbit hole. But it has to be in their own cultural context. 

Børge Hansen 

30 years later, we now are launching the UN manual, the Mendes Principles coming along, some 40 countries participating, it’s starting to, you know, become a movement here.  

Becky Milne 

It is. And, you know, that’s one thing of having lots of PhD children. And they spread the word, you know, and then they also have, have some of them will go on and have PhD students themselves. So I think it’s really important educating the policing world. Cause Ivar and Asbjørn, they came over to do their masters and went on to do PhDs and they have made great waves in Norway. 

I’ve been lucky because I created, you know, I was part of running that first ever police degree. And so I’ve worked with amazing practitioners. you know, they learn a little bit from me. I learn a lot from them and every day is a school day, Børge, every day. And the day I don’t learn is the day I die, you know? I love it.  

Børge Hansen 

So what’s your learning plan going forward then? What is the future? Where are you aiming your sights on?  

Becky Milne 

Yeah, I know. As everyone says, I’ve got to learn to say no, because I say yes to too many things, because I get so excited about too many projects. So one is, you know, doing whatever I can for the UN and Implemendez and working hopefully more with the anti-torture committee, et cetera. I’d love to work more and more in that area. 

I’ve been a single parent, my son is now in his 20s, so I have more free time, as in to move rather than thinking, right, okay, I’ve been asked to go here as a single parent, I’ve always had to have that in mind. So I’d love to work more and do a lot of the work we’ve learned on the war crimes team. There’s been a lot of learning over the last five years. That’s sort of one area is the war crimes.   

Børge Hansen 

Yeah, it becomes more and more relevant to work around.  

Becky Milne 

Wish I wasn’t needed in that sphere. I wish I wasn’t needed. You know, and that’s the thing as a researcher, you’re looking for the research gap, you’re always looking for where’s the research gap. And there’s a big gap in what we know about dealing with victims of war crimes. And unfortunately, there’s a massive gap. And unfortunately, that needs filling. So that’s one area sexual offences is another one, we just don’t get it right. 

And we need to get it right for victims going forward, men and women, really important. But also the sort of another area is practitioners themselves. I’ve seen so many practitioners in the terror attacks who in many countries who have seen awful things and I know it’s part of their job, but no one expects to see the trauma in these tests above and beyond. That’s why they call it critical incident, you know, it’s difficult to prepare them for that. And they need to have proper, we need resilience and there is training of resilience. But most of these are frontline officers. They’re new in service. They’re fresh out of the box, a lot of them. And we need to deal with them properly. And in the past, they’ve been told to write their own statements. And for me, that’s not good enough. They need to properly cognitively process their own trauma. And, in the UK, that’s what we’ve been focusing on as well is part of our triaging mass witnesses. We also put into that the frontline responders too. and you know, I’m shying away, say, please, they’re human beings too. And then you don’t get them to write their own statements. You know, this is just not good enough practice. 

And unfortunately that happens too many times across the globe. These are people they are meant to be helping us. Let us help them too. So for me, that’s another message is we need to look after our frontline too. They’re protecting us. We need to protect them to enable them to protect us. At the moment, I don’t think that’s been done enough. So that’s another one. That’s another one of mine. So at the moment, those are the sort of the key areas, I think.  

Børge Hansen 

So even though, you know, what we talk about here is professionalism, I can see in your eyes when you talk, it’s more than professionalism. This is a passion. It’s a passion project for you.  

Becky Milne 

It is. And people say, will you ever retire? And I’m hoping I’d be like my mentor, my dad number two. I hope I’ll be in that privileged position that I can do that too. And as I said, every day’s a school day and it does it. Seeing the legacy coming through, you know, and it is thank goodness. You know, there was a handful of us initially and now the world. 

It’s growing and growing the world of investigative interviewing, which is just brilliant. And when we were in Combra recently as part of Implemendez know, me and Ray were both there looking at each other and it’s just so nice before we could count us on the hand. And now, you know, it’s a room full of people all excited about implementing Mendez princliples. 

It’s so inspiring. It’s lovely. It just think the family of people working on and researching investigative interviewing is growing rapidly. Yeah. And it is a family. And I think, you know that. So you’ve been part of it as well. And we’ve worked with you for a while. And you know, it’s, it is a family, 

Børge Hansen 

It’s a good point to end this conversation. I can feel the energy flowing through the computer even if you are in remote locations, it’s always a treat talking to you and the passion projects that you have is changing the world. So thank you for that.  

Becky Milne 

And thank you for your time. 

Transcript

Børge Hansen 

Good morning, Emily. How are you today? 

Emily Alison 

Good morning. I’m fine. How are you Børge?  

Børge Hansen 

I’m good. Outside the weather in Norway where I’m at right now, it’s very similar to the first time we met. We actually met in a very picturesque small town in southern part of Norway where the weather was beautiful and we met for the first time me, you, Lawrence and Norwegian police detective Ivar Fahsing. And we talked about for the first time about the work that you guys have done, the work that we and Davidhorn are doing, and how do we collaborate and work on expanding the field of investigative interviewing?  

Emily Alison 

Yes, absolutely. Yes, well, I’m quite jealous then because here in the UK, we’ve had about 10 months of rain and it persists. So I’ve just come in out with the rain this morning. 

Børge Hansen  

Yeah. Can you for our listeners, why don’t you give them a little bit of who is Emily Allison? 

Emily Alison 

Right. Yes. So there’s a question. So I am a research associate and psychologist at the University of Liverpool. And I have specialized in working on interviewing and interrogation practices for at least the last, well, 20 years really, 12 years by research design. The reason I often have trouble answering that question is I also have a extensive background working in domestic abuse treatment, principally for perpetrators, but also intervention with young people and children and families. And I mentioned that because even though they’re separate areas, there’s a lot of overlap between the different areas that I’ve worked. 

Børge Hansen 

You and your husband, Lawrence, for people working in the field. If you search online for your names, quite quickly there’s another term coming up, orbit. And for people who dig a little bit further, as you say, you invested a lot in this.  So why in this field of interviewing, interrogation and all that, have you focused so much on rapport building? And why does the orbit method exist? How did it come about?  

Emily Alison 

Right. So basically, Lawrence and I were providing training and input to various police forces. And, you know, my background, which was much more therapeutic, Lawrence’s background, which is really around critical incident decision making, but also we both had elements of communication and in 2012 we had the opportunity through research funding obtained through the HIG, an organization in the US which stands for the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group that rolls off the tongue. 

Basically, that group was set up under the Obama administration to establish if we are not going to use enhanced interrogation techniques, otherwise known as torture, to secure information from terrorists, then what are we going to use and what science is available to help us solve that problem? 

So really the HIG is quite a unique organization in that it, well, for many reasons, it is very much focused on using scientific research and then operationalizing that for frontline practitioners. But also it’s a cooperative between agencies who don’t normally work together in such a way. So the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Defense. 

And interestingly, because it’s a global initiative, we were able to secure some funding to look at what is actually effective in that context. And that is how Orbit came about.  

Børge Hansen 

So you looked at past interrogations and interviews and then deciphered what worked and what didn’t work. Is that the case? 

Emily Alison 

Absolutely. So in this domain, I mean, that that’s kind of it sounds beautifully simple the way you say it as well. Because one of the issues in this area is that a lot of the research is it’s difficult to access this data. It’s very sensitive data. Agencies often feel very uncomfortable about allowing academic review of it. And so it was a real, again, a measure of the trust in Lawrence and I from our previous years of work with UK policing and their trust in us to allow us to look at actual interviews with terrorist suspects. So all of the data that Orbit is based on, it’s now been replicated on suspects of child sexual abuse and indecent image cases. 

It’s also been replicated with sexual assault victims by Sungwon Kim, who’s a previous South Korean police officer and researcher. And so it’s all real world data. And that’s actually quite unique in this kind of space where it’s not asking students to pretend to be terrorists and get a pizza voucher at the end.  

Børge Hansen 

So yeah, so that’s because that’s from my experience where we see that that’s typically how at least investigators or police officers are trained is on other students on more simulations rather on real. And then their training is based on not actual investigation or cases where you investigate actual cases, but rather simulate. What’s the difference here, you think? Because you say you’re based on your methods and then you have to train on them but on actual real world cases.  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, I think for me, it’s not to say that there’s no value to be gained from doing that more experimental research with students, because the advantage of that is you can highly control the variables that you’re looking at. But the problem is they aren’t actually, they don’t translate directly to the muddiness and the grayness and the complexity of that real world environment. So, for instance, when you’re looking at there’s a common technique that’s used in interviewing called funneling, which is that you start with a very general series of questions that open up someone’s account. So you say, basically tell me everything you can remember about those events at the weekend. And then you funnel down to more specific questions. 

Now the problem with that is if you’ve got someone who isn’t highly motivated to resist you, and by that I mean trained in counter interrogation potentially, you know, is going to actually stonewall you and give you complete silence. How will you ask for a general open account from someone and go more specific if that’s what you have in front of you? So it definitely tells you about how people communicate and gives you some principles to do that sort of transferable research. But for us, it was let’s get right in there into the mud and complexity of what this really looks like. Look at what interviewers are doing that is working to secure information. And we don’t mean just any information. We mean information that’s of intelligence value or evidential value. And then let’s also look at what they’re doing that’s getting in their own way. So what is actually stopping that flow of information? 

In very difficult, challenging context with highly resistant people, you know, people who may be being deceptive, who may, as I say, use total avoidance, you know, turn around and face the wall to people who will actually, you know, want to what we call backfooting. So like verbally attacking the interviewer and what they stand for as a way to distract and get out of questions. And student studies struggle to replicate the intensity and complexity of that environment that officers are actually working in.  

Børge Hansen 

So what would you say is the most crucial factor? Is it the interviewer or interviewee in terms of because, you know, you describe situations where maybe, you know, people are, as you say, stonewalling you or all the ways of distracting or voluntarily or involuntarily distracting you for actually progressing with your interview. Is it the interviewee that’s the challenge or is the interviewers?  

Emily Alison 

Well, I think that I wish I could say a definitive answer. I think it can be both. But for me, what’s the only factor that you can control? And that’s the interviewer. So it’s the interviewers obligation to manage their own behavior and manage the suspect’s behavior, the detainees behavior. You know, you don’t, so in other words, we know from the orbit model, we’re looking at instinctive patterns of communication. So ways that people respond to each other. That’s why you get this transfer to, you know, all sorts of relationships, how people get on with each other or not. 

Because we’re looking at that, we can help the interviewer manage pretty much any form of interviewee behavior. And that puts the responsibility on them where it should be. They’re the professional in the room. That is an obligation that sits with them. If the other person wants to be resistant and attempt to conceal or to be deceptive, that’s their choice. The interviewer needs to manage themselves. 

Børge Hansen  

So in the material that you guys were researching on, you have all sorts of situations, right? People being collaborative and not collaborative.  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, absolutely. So you can get someone who talks loads and is actually really cooperative in police interview or appears that way, but they aren’t actually answering any questions. So all of their responses are relatively vague. They try to distract with other topics. 

And that looks very different from some of the other situations I’ve described where they may be verbally aggressive or totally silent. You know, these are, these are intense interpersonal challenges that, you know, are pretty unique to that kind of environment. But people might be thinking about, you know, if you’re dealing with your teenager and they’re giving you complete silence or verbally attacking you because they don’t want to talk about what you’re trying to talk to them about. 

Børge Hansen 

So there’s some parallels. I have a teenage daughter, so I’m eager to learn about how to deal with the rolling of the eyes. my God, as she says. Tell me, so when you started this material, what was the first kind of science that you guys were onto? A structured, because orbit is a very structured method of dealing with various situations. And then, you know, when you’re researching and then seeing what works, it didn’t work. How did that come about? Because, you know, as you decipher through all of this, I remember you said earlier, it was several thousand interviews, right? So kind of deciphering and understanding what happens and because all people are different and situations are different. So how do you categorize and build a structure out of this?  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve coded over 2000 hours of interviews now, of suspect interviews. And when I say coded, we’re doing exactly that, just as you described, we’re looking for what’s the underlying system that sits beneath the styles of communication. And to my mind, like, it is really just putting a kind of structure around those ways in which we communicate and those things that help facilitate communication or build rapport and those things that damage it or get in the way. And so because of that, Orbit is giving you two things. It’s giving you a diagnostic tool where you can look at the person across from you and think, how does this person like to communicate? Do they like things totally upfront? Do they like a more warm social chit chat? Do they actually want the other person to take charge of the situation? 

So Orbit gives you that kind of interpersonal map and it also tells you how they will react to your response. So in that way, it can give you a strategy going forward. So if you have a issue or a problem that you’re encountering with a particular interviewee, then it gives you a recommendation for how to actually tackle that, that’s going to be suited to that person and their individual style. 

And that’s drawn from our sort of background, as I say, as psychologists in the foundation principles of social communication, of personality theory. So we’ve drawn on a lot of foundation fundamentals from the literature. So things like Timothy Leary’s interpersonal circumplex, looking at how people react to each other in communication and how that’s influenced by their personality that sits within the model. We’ve drawn on motivational interviewing, which is Rolnick and Miller, and humanistic theories of communication. So more Rogerian like that, which I mean, that’s quite an interesting thing to bring into this space, because Carl Rogers sort of theory, I call him the anti Freud is basically that, you know, the therapist or the person that the interviewer is not the expert on the interviewee. They are. They’re the ones with the information. So if you’re going to unlock that and get them to speak, then you need to understand them. It’s not about you learning a particular trick or a tactic or a deception that you can use on them to get them to talk. It’s you understanding them in such a way that they feel able to communicate. And I know that sounds a little bit, i mean, it’s great for parenting in a more adversarial space that can feel a bit like alien, I think, to officers. But what we’ve said is, what’s the goal of what you’re doing? It’s to get that information.  

Børge Hansen 

So you’re applying empathy to the situation, not being sympathetic or agreeing with the interviewer if he’s a suspect. But is applying empathy to the situation you’re in and then building rapport based on that?  

Well, absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the fundamental principles. We call them the here principles within the orbit model. The first one is honesty. The second one is empathy. And those two are probably the most fundamental to building a rapport based relationship with somebody where there’s trust. 

Emily Alison 

and understanding. And that’s what you’re aiming for. It’s not agreement. And just like you say, Berger, it’s not sympathy. You’re not in any way condoning, colluding, making excuses for the other person’s behavior or anything that they say. You’re attempting to understand their mindset, why they’ve chosen to act the way they have, what their core values are, what they care about. And it’s that curiosity. So that’s our sort of tagline is to say, lead your communication from a position of curiosity, not suspicion. 

Børge Hansen 

In the past investigators were trained by other investigators and if you failed or didn’t excel, well, then you’re not a people person then. That’s what they said. But you’re taking a very different approach here. This is much more structured than just being, you know, having tricks or being, you know, coached by others. This is a scientific way of, is this for everyone to learn?  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, this is, people will often say, well, rapport building is interpersonal skill is like something you either have or you don’t. And there is definitely a sort of baseline measure of whether you have those skills naturally or not. But with Orbit, as I say, because you basically have a roadmap for how to build rapport, what styles of communication are actually going to be effective, that anyone could actually learn. It’s effortful and it does require practice because sometimes you’re having to. So for me, for instance, I’m sure I’m probably giving away my Midwestern roots here, but I can be a bit bossy and I like to be chatty. So for me, that’s my comfort zone. And I know this about my personality. I hate conflict. I absolutely loathe it, but I can do it now. After 20 years of teaching and instructing and researching orbit, if you put me in a conflict situation, I know what I’m supposed to do. to be effective in that kind of zone. And that for me is gold dust because it’s not natural for everyone to be good at all of these different styles, but you can learn it. And for me, that’s a revelation to think, well, I don’t actually have to be uncomfortable in those situations because this is helping me understand what to do. 

Børge Hansen 

What separates_ So, as you said, it’s interpersonal skills. Who would typically struggle with learning and who excels at learning this? Because you guys have trained quite a lot of people now throughout the years. What’s the pattern here? Who excels and how do people struggle with this?  

Emily Alison 

Well, it’s a very individual thing. So one of the first things that we do with people is to and you can actually, we do have a link that we’ve just put on our website, which is www.orbinterviewing.com. It’s a link to a communication questionnaire that kind of tells you. So building self-awareness is the first thing, and it tells you, these are the things that you’re very good at, where you’re naturally comfortable, and these are the things you will struggle with, or where you will actually damage communication. So if you’re going to go bad, what does that look like for you? So that’s kind of where we start and that’s so different for everyone. I would say that when people have been indoctrinated into a system that is very formulaic that almost takes the humanness out of communication, that is often a problem. 

They’re so locked into procedure and structure, which is important. It’s important in these professional spaces to have structure. However, if that’s to the detriment of building communication and connection, then you’re going to massively limit the amount of information. Think about when people, if you go to the doctor’s office and they have a, you know, say they’re doing an assessment with you about potential issues around, I don’t know, diabetes or, you know, anything. It could be that they’re trying to assess. If they work through that as a checklist in a formulaic way, even if you have something you are concerned about or that you think might be true, you might hesitate or be reluctant to say it because it’s just quick, quick, quick onto the next question. Do you know the answer to that or not? And you don’t really have time to reflect or think or consider, actually I might disclose that even though it’s a bit sensitive. So I think we’re often trying to bring people back to their humanness in their communication.  

Børge Hansen 

So in some ways with the Orbit framework, to be a good interviewer, you have to start with yourself and be self-aware of who you are and how you’re perceived by others. Is that the way? 

Emily Alison  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. And I think, I mean, that’s, we could link that to what makes you good at empathy. So empathy is built in three stages, really. The first is, do you actually understand your own thoughts and feelings about things? And if you can’t articulate that, that’s already limiting. And then the second stage is, can you see things from other people’s point of view? If you were in their situation? 

How would it make you feel? What would you think? But we’re talking about third stage empathy, which is kind of what I call clinical cognitive empathy, which is if I were actually you. So to do that, I’d have to consider, I mean, I know a little bit about, you know, your background and where you grew up and things like that, but I have to try to imagine, well, if I had had those experiences, would I? 

Would I make those decisions the same things that you’ve done? And that’s why it’s so challenging. It is a definite expertise to be able to do that with people.  

Børge Hansen 

So by applying that, you know, advanced level of empathy, you are able to connect better with people and then that’s the means to an end. So one mean one way of getting, you know, building reports so that people can connect to you and then you can have a conversation. Is that it?  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, I mean, in one of the ways we often talk about this is that the other person feels seen by you. So it’s not actually, sometimes there’s this stereotype of rapport that it’s like, we’ll find, we’ll find some connect. Cause I grew up in like tiny remote snowy place. And I know so did you. I could try to sort of say, well, that makes us the same. you know, and isn’t that a connection? And that’s nice. And it is genuine. If I lied and I actually grew up in New York City and I tried to bluff you, that’s where it becomes a trick. Whereas what we’re saying with rapport building is it actually doesn’t matter whether you and I have similarity or not. I need to just try to understand things from your perspective. 

That’s easier if we have some shared experiences than if we don’t. But if we don’t, I can still put myself in that mindset of trying to see things from your point of view. And the point I was going to make about that was when you’re able to do that and do it well and see what someone cares about, values, what they think and feel about things, they feel seen by you. Now that’s important. 

Because it builds connection with relationships that matter to us that people were close to. But in a suspect interviewing environment, when someone feels seen by you, it’s harder for them to lie. And that is an advantage. So once they feel seen genuinely by you, it’s harder for them to be deceptive when you then ask those upfront direct questions.  

Børge Hansen 

You guys have, you know, in orbit there’s a, like a quadrant or a circle with four quadrants there. And then you put some animals to the different behavioral types. Could you just talk a little bit about that? Because you have everything from mice to dinosaurs there.  

Emily Alison 

Yeah. The animals is a slightly, it came about because I was doing this communication work with families after violence and trying to rebuild communication between parents and children. After there had been quite a lot of trauma in the household, but this was a way that I could teach even, you know, a five or six year old communicate sophisticated communication skills. So it would be a which animal is mommy most of the time? Is she a bossy lion? A shy mouse? Is she a cheeky monkey or a scary T rex? Which animal is daddy? Which animal are you? And I use the animals just as monikers, but then our professionals sort of grabbed hold of it and said, look, we love that. It makes it easy to remember because what you’re actually. 

Børge Hansen 

So the animals stuck.  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. People like it. But then we end up saying, well, you know, what are you? What area do you like? So like the way I describe myself, I’m lion monkey. So I like things to be warm and friendly and conversational. And I can be a bit bossy and like to be in charge. Just ask my teenager. But then other people like to be on receive. They like to listen. They like to be more in the background. And other people like the sort of T -Rex mode, which is, I mean, that’s definitely Lawrence. We always laugh because we’re total opposite. 

You know, he has no problem with conflict and dealing with that like really well, very assertive, confident, frank, forthright and direct. And those are all different interpersonal skills, some natural and some you have to work at. But that’s the sort of model that we start with, which is what’s your style? What’s the person across from you? What’s their style and what is actually going to match best?  

Børge Hansen 

It’s a way of navigating or categorizing different types of behaviors and then also how to respond.  

Emily Alison 

I would definitely say navigating because it does have a flow. So we’d say in the same conversation, you could find yourself moving around that framework, which is why we sort of say it’s that diagnostic initially, but then it’s a map. It’s a roadmap for where do I need to take this communication? So if I have to have a difficult conversation about something, I know I’m going to have to be frank and forthright. What response is that going to get? I can use the map to predict and then manage it. So it is quite empowering to think, you know, especially for those awkward communication situations, you have to ask people for money back or you have to tell, you know, I think we’ve got one in the book, which is you have to tell your dad that you know, he may have to give up his driving license, your elderly father. And like, that’s an awkward, difficult conversation. It’s quite emotional. How do you have that conversation and have it well so that it doesn’t damage your relationship with each other? 

Børge Hansen  

If we shift gears a little bit, so Orbit and rapport building is crucial for interpersonal connections. And then just recently we know that the UN has released a manual for investigative interviewing in criminal investigations. How do you see Orbit in the context of investigative interviewing. And we see a lot of the investigative interviewing practices started in the UK. There was some Nordic work being done. And then it’s now part of UN Mendes principles. The Manual has come. Where do you see Orbit? And how do you see the flow now for what’s happening in the world with more and more focus on these types of investigations. What’s your observations first of all? You’ve been in the field for quite some time now.  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, I think that for me it’s such an important movement to be taking place. And it does really feel like we’re at this sort of tipping point around interview practice globally. Because there’s more awareness of what is happening in various parts of the world. And I include North America in that and the use of more accusatorial, coercive or deceptive methods. So I’m sure you’ll be aware of the legislation that’s currently sort of sweeping its way across the US, outlying the use of deception in interviews with juveniles. I mean, that barely seems like a sentence you should have to utter which is basically the police shouldn’t be allowed to lie to children in interview. And yet that is something… Because one of the principles you had was being honest.  

Børge Hansen 

So basically, legislation allows you to actually break that connection with your suspect or witness.  

Emily Alison 

Well, absolutely. And to an extreme level around implying inconsistencies in their account that aren’t backed up by evidence implying the evidence exists you know or strengthening evidence that when that isn’t there you know seeing your DNAis at the scene and things like that when it’s not i mean you shouldn’t really be we would argue and even globally that there’s plenty of evidence to say you don’t need to do that at all to get information and in fact the fundamental difference, I think, with this is that, and which the Mendes principles bring about, is this removal of externally pressurizing tactics. That the point of an investigative interview is to investigate. So it’s not for me to seek a confession. So the goal is information and an account that I can then test against the evidence. So whether you lie to me or not, I don’t care. I will test whatever you say against the evidence that I have. And that surely is the definition of investigation. And yet, so I think there is this issue where in more accusatory methods, there’s these externally pressurizing tactics that are used to try to secure confession. And that to me is the problem. I mean that’s the fundamental issue. So then you’ve asked me, where does Orbit fit in this framework?  

Børge Hansen 

I’m sorry, but you know, I think, so this is my personal experience, I think we as humans, you know, we are biased and then we, when we, you know, think one and one adds up to become two, we kind of go for it. And then that’s, you know, when you talk about accusatorial methods, that’s where you kind of say, I believe that your guilt is I’m seeking out to prove that right. And that’s an intuitive way for us humans, because seeing is believing and we have a bias and you know, it’s intuitive. So what you’re, you know, working on investigative imaging that’s kind of more, it’s in some way counterintuitive.  

Emily Alison 

In some ways in that you, well, you aren’t allowed to make up your mind until you know, until you genuinely know, until there is no other alternative. And sometimes, you’re not going to achieve that level. It’s on the balance of evidence. The whole point is if you’re being objective and coming from that position of curiosity rather than suspicion, then you should be able to suspend that bias that or at least try to mitigate it. Cause you’re right. You know, it’s, it’s often unconscious. You can’t help, but think what you think about the situation, but we’re trying to put in principles that actually counter that natural bias and give you some objectivity to operate from because we know countless cases where you could get 100 people to look at it and 98 % of them would say, I know what’s happened here. And it’s not actually accurate. It’s not the truth. I mean, in fact, we were just out in California doing some training and presenting at a symposium around interview practice. 

And at the same symposium were the couple involved in the American nightmare case, which again, you know, is really popular on Netflix. That’s loaded. People watched it. But that case is a case where I think you could show, you know, a hundred people that case and they’d think, I, you know, that looks suspicious to me. I don’t think that’s true. But instead of operating on what’s going on here, the investigators decided. 

I know what’s happened. I’m 100 % certain what’s happened and I’m going to pursue that to the exclusion of any other potential explanation. And the consequences of that were catastrophic and heartbreaking. So I think for me, it’s that, and to be fair, that’s not their natural mindset. It’s actually one that’s been trained into them to decide and then to pursue, to pursue that narrative, that confession, you know, it’s literally built into the system, but has no science behind it. So for us, it’s part of orbit. I mean, you asked me how sort of orbit fits into this. And for me, it is that it is bringing a framework for investigators. If we’re going to say, stop using this method that is confession driven, that is bias, that is led by suspicion and confirmation bias instead of science. Then what are we going to do instead if we’re going to take that away from you, which I agree, you know, the Mendes principles is an important platform to say these are the operating principles. But investigators will say, well, how am I supposed to get in there then? How am I supposed to get what you say I’m there to get, they won’t tell me anything. And what we’ve demonstrated with Orbit is using these kinds of communication strategies generates internal pressure. So in other words, if I haven’t done anything, I’m innocent and I’m in a police interview. 

I might just naturally feel external pressure. I might feel intimidated by that environment and a bit frightened, but I won’t feel internal pressure because I haven’t done anything. So inside I’ll only tell you everything that I can because I haven’t done it. Whereas if I am guilty, I might feel the same natural external pressure, but the Orbit principles try to mitigate that external pressure by creating honesty, empathy. 

You know, all these sorts of principles. And instead it generates internal pressure, which is that I’m finding it very hard to continue to be deceptive or to conceal the actual truth of what’s happened. So, and that absolutely is how it should be. It should be that I don’t tell you something because you pressured it out of me. I tell you because I feel enough internal pressure that I feel I have to explain myself. That should be why someone confesses, not because you force it out of them.  

Børge Hansen 

Would you say that Orbit is a scientific based method about rapport building, but it’s also investigations. You have to kind of unlock your own bias and then look at the case from many different sides and have an open mind approach to everything. Is it a scientific approach for doing interviews on a whole? Do you think it’s the solution for? I would. 

Emily Alison 

Well, I would absolutely say, I mean, it’s not an interview structure models like, you know, sort of piece or frameworks like that, that are sort of breaking up the chunks of an interview, the different phases of an interview. And in fact, what we’ve said is the issue is that rapport was kind of often stereotyped as what you do at the start. You know, I ask you how you slept, I ask you if you want a cup of tea, and that that is such a simplistic view of rapport. That is not what we’re talking about when we talk about rapport. We’re talking about actually building genuine trust and connection with the other person. And that is something that is relevant to every stage of the interview. So whether you are in the initial stages of getting an open account, whether you are actually presenting evidence to the individual, we’ve said rapport always massers to the interview. And in fact, a lot of the offensive areas that we work in, it’s not just the offense in front of you. It may be all of the other behaviors that this individual is involved in, whether that’s terrorism, indecent image, rings of offenders, et cetera. So my attitude when we’re training with police officers just to say, do you want them for the thing you have in front of you? Or do you want them for everything that they are actually involved in? And that that that’s what we’re aiming for. And if you want that, then you don’t get to burn the rapport bridge. You don’t get to do the Hollywood slam it on the table and gotcha as psychologically satisfying as that is to the investigator. You just don’t get to have that moment. 

You know, you can have it outside the room, but you can’t have it in the room.  

Børge Hansen 

You talked a little bit about accusatorial methods earlier, and then we talked about the Mendez principles. If you go back to what kind of cultural shifts do you see across the world right now? Because I know you train in Europe, but you’re training in the States and probably elsewhere in the world. How do you see the world changing now? 

And where do you see these kind of techniques? Or are there environments where people struggle more with this because they train more for other ways of working?  

Emily Alison 

Yeah, I think, I mean, I sort of described it as a tipping point. And that kind of means we’re at the crest of the wave. So it’s quite frothy. There’s a little bit of a global bun fight going on between these sort of different approaches. I feel like that’s natural. However, you know, what I would hope and certainly aspire to is that science will win, which is that I understand there’s a reluctance to let go of historically used techniques or methods that people feel, well, that’s worked for me. And you know, it’s very, it’s, you have to accept accusatorial or coercive methods whilst they, you know, we hear that and know that it runs the risk of false confession. It’s also gotten plenty of true confessions out of people. So people feel reinforced by that and think it’s, well, it’s worked. So, but, but for me, it’s sort of supporting people to say, you know, embrace that advance, embrace what knowledge is telling us, you know, change as the knowledge base is changing. And you would do that in any form of policing. So whether it’s digital forensic analysis, it’s blood spatter analysis, it’s, you know, DNA technology, as these things have become more and more advanced and refined, practice has changed with it. Why wouldn’t we do that with interviewing. Why would we just say, well, you’re either a person or you’re not, you know, we know way too much about how to do this job well and effectively to still pretend that we just have to wing it on the basis of, you know, what somebody’s been doing for 20 years. There’s enough science to tell it to point us in the right direction, I think.  

Børge Hansen 

So how do if if a man, a police officer investigator, I mean, or even a parent understanding, okay, I’m going about this in the wrong way. I’m curious to learn about this science -based proven method of how to build rapport and investigate better. How do I get started? What’s your advice to get started? People are curious about this.  

Emily Alison 

Well, as I say, it is part of that self -awareness. It is understanding the principles objectively. That’s the main thing for me is that it does remove your emotional impulses out of it. And it says this, you’re still allowed to have those emotions, but they might not actually be helping you achieve your goal. So for instance, say you want your teenager, I mean, this has been a horrendous time for young people as well, kind of post pandemic has made them feel very isolated, avoidant. If what you’re wanting is to sort of encourage your child to, you know, go out, embrace the world, go to university or whatever, you have to have that conversation from a position of trying to understand them, not just ordering them and telling them what to do. So for that purpose, you have to actually be prepared to put the work in and the patience to do things this way, understanding that it will give you that long -term connection, bond, trust between you and your child or you and whoever it is that you’re trying to build that relationship with. And that is massively effortful. So I think that’s probably a good place to start is of thinking who actually do I care about enough that I want to put this work in? To being able to do this in this way, because it is effortful and there will be slip ups. I mean, Lawrence and I have been doing this for 20 years and we still will regularly mess up and also tell each other when we mess up. So also I think that’s the other thing is like, if you are trying to do the right thing and do this in the right way as much as possible, it will protect you from those excesses. And that’s my main thing. For people using it individually, that’s great. For people using it professionally, you should have a system or organization that supports you doing things in the right way, not teaches you how to do them the wrong way, and then you have to overcome it or undo it. 

Børge Hansen 

Good to hear that you guys are human as well and then you can miss that because I know it’s hard work to learn this and you will make mistakes here and there. And then as you say, with the right training and surroundings, you could learn from your mistakes and improve. So what’s next for the Alisons now? What’s up?  

Emily Alison 

I think we’ve not had a proper holiday for about five years, so maybe that. 

But it doesn’t look near on the horizon. I think for us, we have a number of things where we are tackling, in particular, these accusatorial methods used principally in North America, also elsewhere in the world. And we feel like we, without even quite trying, we’ve ended up squared up in that fight is important to me as a citizen of the world, but also of the United States by birth to try to promote that positive change. I think it pains me to see, this is what I said at this conference in California. I said, please don’t misunderstand that we are about you doing this or changing your style because of the person across from you. 

That’s important in terms of how you treat someone who is actually in your custody. But oftentimes the person across from these people have done horrific things, horrendous things to other human beings. But my issue is to also say this is about you and how you see yourself and you surely should not reduce yourself, compromise yourself, undermine yourself for a job where you are trying to do the right thing, you know, see justice done, be the hero, and suddenly it’s turning you into the villain. So for me, it is really a bit of a mission. I think I said after that, I said, I feel like for the last 20 years, we’ve maybe been tilting at windmills. Well, we’re about to blow the windmill up. So I feel quite optimistic about that. 

Børge Hansen 

This is really cool. Well, I wish you all and ourselves best of luck in Europe and supporting you and on the mission that you guys have. I think it’s the right mission. I think we’re all cheering and supporting you all the way. Thank you, Emily, for being on the podcast and good luck.  

Emily Alison 

Thank you very much. And same to you, Børge. Thank you.