Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 
Well, good evening, everybody. And welcome to the Davidhorn interview summit here in Copenhagen and to this live podcast. And welcome to you as well, Laurence Alison This is why they’re strange, isn’t it? My name is Ivar Fahsing and it’s it’s an honor to hosting you tonight. we’ve been through, discussion Laurence on, I go straight to the ball.

Laurence Alison: (00:17)
We will.

Speaker 2 (00:27)
One of your great products, I have years of research, is called Orbit. It’s a rapport-based interviewing approach. And as you know, the ruling kind of scientific approach to interviewing is called PEACE Model.

Is this the death of PEACE

Speaker 1 (00:44)
No, absolutely not. And if I said anything to that effect, I’d probably be shot by Andy Smith, who’s the national lead at the moment. Yeah, I think there’s a bit of confusion. It’s definitely not a competitive model. And I think it is very sympathetic with PEACE If you read the original PEACE documentation, there’s nothing in it that is inconsistent with what we’re teaching at all. What I think has happened to PEACE a bit is some of it has been taught not as it was originally written.

And sometimes when we’re training people, some of the officers have treated it as very mechanical. You have to do this bit, you have to do this bit, you have to do this bit and so forth and so on. Even down to the inappropriate translation of the so-called challenge phase, where sometimes what we have seen in some UK interviews is they get right to the end and then suddenly they throw everything at the challenge phase. But that’s not in the original version of PEACE.

So I don’t think it’s a competitive model. I think it’s broadly sympathetic and congruent with what is taught in PEACE. And PEACE, as I see it, is largely a planning approach anyway, about the phases that are important to conduct and go through. and Orbit is very, very specific. It’s enabling police officers to understand the skills that are required to deal with people when they are being resistant or difficult.

not in a way to trick them or persuade them or cajole them or manipulate them, but to make that interaction reasonable, proportionate and fair. So if someone’s talking to you, don’t need any of the Orbit stuff because it’s working. It’s when you’re met with resistance or difficulty that those skills are important.

Speaker 2 (02:15)
So the church that we’re hearing in here now is not for PEACE.

Speaker 1 (02:19)
It is not for PEACE in there. I mean, it’s not for me to say, it? You know, PEACE has been around for a long time. It seems to be working perfectly well for UK police, so there’s no reason to change it. But there’s, for me, there’s nothing within what we’re teaching which is inconsistent or incongruent with what’s mapped out in PEACE.

Speaker 2 (02:35)
You’re so polite Laurence. I was saying in a break here there’s something missing. Could I suggest maybe this is like a turbo booster?

Speaker 1 (02:46)
You’re

trying to get me to say something bad about PEACE.

Speaker 2 (02:48)
More that, as you said, okay, let’s slip it then and say, what is Orbit not delivering?

Speaker 1 (02:54)
Not delivering. I think it doesn’t touch on a very important part of what is important in an interview, which is the decision making. You know, the cognitive processes about how you manage an interview, what the sorts of questions are, things like the strategic use of evidence, those elements, pre-interview disclosure, prepare statements, all that element of it, which we all know are important. You know, a lot of your work as well, Ivar and the decision making elements of it. It’s not a decision making model.

It’s a very specific model about how you deal with people differently, depending on the different forms of resistance. mean, going back to the PEACE thing, know, what PEACE doesn’t teach officers is how you deal with people when they’re difficult. And that’s what we focused on.

Speaker 2 (03:35)
It’s a very nice clarification to get because there are different models out there and sometimes you think of should we take A or B. Here you need two pills.

Speaker 1 (03:45)
Yeah, I mean, as you know, we’ve trained all over the world, have you and different police forces are using different things and we were talking about it before. You know, there’s a lot of confusion and if I was a frontline police officer being given interview training, I wouldn’t know what was going on because it does feel a bit pick and mix. You know, I think there’s too many ideas in the pot and my advice would be to the police is to interrogate any model that you are being sold.

What is the basis for you teaching me this? What data is it based on? What is the sort of data that is based on? When you make that claim, tell me what the claim is based on. Where’s the evidence for it? I mean, in the same way that you wouldn’t take a pill or a medical intervention with that, I would assume, knowing that it’s had rigorous testing. Yeah.

You know, I would want to know what I’m about to put if my body and that there’s been some testing of it. So not all the models that are out there are equally based on strong evidence.

Speaker 2 (04:40)
Absolutely not.

If you think about Orbit, we’d be discussing that I think in some communities, in some countries, flies very well, it’s very popular, especially in the Netherlands and the UK, and you’ve just been presented in Norway, I guess in Ireland, there are some offices I know is really fond of it. Are there places where you think this is more needed?

Then, other

Speaker 1 (05:03)
Well, I think it’s needed in the US because historically they’ve been using other methods which are not based on evidence, which have been endemic and are kind of ingrained in the DNA of how they operate. so I think weirdly where we can have quite a lot of impact probably is in the US. And I think that vehicle is slowly turning around. But if you’ve been using technique A for 60, 70 years, and that is the

preferred model just because it’s been around for a long time. I think that that is a hard message to convince people of. That said, you know, we’re working with the district attorney of the state of California, lovely fellow called Vern Pearson, who’s very responsive to it. And we go out each year and we do trainings there. And they’re trying to scale that activity up there. And, you know, it is, it is slowly turning around to the point where I think there’s very going to be very little

of these other techniques used in the state of California, at least. Plus also we’re working with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, FLETC. They’re very responsive and my experience of the US with the HIG as well, High Valley Detainee Derogation Group, they’re quite responsive. They’re appropriately skeptical, but they’re pretty responsive to it.

Speaker 2 (06:14)
to ask you, because you also travel a lot around the world. I was just thinking maybe there is a cultural underlying issue here that is beyond or is not linked necessarily to interviewing more, are we taking lessons from this country or not? Who are you to teach me?

Speaker 1 (06:31)
Possibly, yeah, maybe. mean, in truth, we don’t really encounter that when we go to different countries. I’ve been surprised how receptive people are. There might be a little bit of resistance. I mean, I can’t name names, can I? There was one military group that we were with, I remember, a couple of years ago, and I remember walking in the room, and I thought, my God, this is going to be a nightmare. There’s about 30 of them, and they all tattoos, folded arms, and you could tell very experienced people.

And quite reasonably, they were sort of looking at a bearded psychologist and thinking, does he know? Fair enough, you know. But we turned it around pretty quickly through what we were talking about and being respectful to it and allowing discussion to come out and blah, blah. I haven’t particularly found that anywhere. I’ve found a healthy skepticism, but broadly a receptivity. But going back to your point about PEACE and PACE I do think in the UK,

Where our officers can be weak in interviewing is in a lack of persistence and a lack of rigor and a lack of fair and even-handed but firm questioning. I think there is a little bit of that, whether that is a pendulum swing from PACE where there’s a kind of reticence to, you know, probe a bit more, whatever it is, I don’t know. But certainly I see in some of our UK officers, you see a question asked and they’ll

be given a half an answer but not really an answer and they’ll go god I can’t ask I can’t probe on that because that’s like asking another question but I think if the person has given an incomplete answer you’re well within your rights to explore it a bit or if there’s a discrepancy in what’s been said well that doesn’t make sense you’ve said this but on the other hand we’ve got this so I think there’s a little bit of tentativeness in in some of our UK law enforcement and and whether that’s associated with PEACE I don’t know

I can’t say, but there’s certainly that element there.

Speaker 2 (08:17)
The reason I asked you this cultural question, remember you’re Asbjørn Rachlew know, a friend of both of us. We were doing training down in Beirut and partly funded by the European Union. So there were two high ranking officials coming down to inspect this training room just to see that the money was spent the way it was intended. It was a German judge and a French former Supreme court judge.

And they were kind of beginning observing from the back and just, you know, a little bit reserved. But then as the days progressed, they were getting more and more involved and enthusiastic around it. I thought, it looks really good. And then we went out for dinner and they were so, them were all in, oh, this is really good. And I said, so after a couple of glasses of wine, I said to say, isn’t it

Isn’t it fascinating? We’re sitting here in Beirut now. The German and the French judge and you’re very fascinated about what we’re implementing here in Beirut. And this is not implemented in any of your countries. So in the taxi back to the hotel,

I think it was a German that said, Ivar you surely know why. You must know why it’s not taken on in either France or in Germany. said, no, help me.

Speaker 1 (09:28)
British.

Well, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (09:29)
Wah agwin, that’s even a rate

Speaker 1 (09:31)
Well, I mean, I’ll give you another story. Not that this is interviewing relevant, but we developed a tool to look at resource management in indecent image cases. And as you know, there are so many individuals that are downloading, distributing, or in possession of indecent images in the UK and everywhere else that you can’t investigate all of them. So you have to investigate the ones that you think are much more probably.

involved in a contact offender as well. We’d like to pick them all up, but we can’t. We’ve got to go for the ones that are actually contact offenders. Anyway, for many years, we developed a tool and it started off in Kent. I was working with the police officer, Matthew Long, lovely fellow. He’s now got out of child protection, but he got very high up in the NCA. Lovely fellow, did a PhD with me. Anyway, for many years, we developed this tool and it was very good. It was very accurate. It was very accurate at correctly identifying those individuals that were much more likely to be contact offenders.

whilst also correctly identifying those individuals that were not likely to be contacted vendors. We then did a big project. We were funded by when we were in the European Union by the Fighting International. we’ve got some decent money to look at it in Estonia, in Spain, various other countries. And some of you may be aware of Hofstede’s work about cultural variability. And the question was asked, well,

in these different countries, maybe pedophiles are different, you know, so there may be different in the UK as to Estonia and this despair. I said, that’s no, you’re wasting your money. The tool will be the same wherever we go. I guarantee you the tool will be said. Anyway, we got data from Estonia and all these other countries. And unsurprisingly, the tool is pretty much exactly the same. Tiny, tiny variations. But each country wanted it to be called. You know,

ERAT if it was in Estonia or SPERAT if it was in Spain or FERAT at if it was in France because they wanted that ownership over their own tool. So I think there’s a bit of politicking and you know, whatever but as a scientist you just don’t care. mean it is what it is. It’s like with the Orbit thing. It’s not that we you know we’ve done studies of how to appropriately speak to child victims of sexual abuse in South Korea. The model’s the same.

honesty, empathy, autonomy, evocation, interest in values, thoughts and beliefs. The forms of resistance or difficulty might be different, embarrassment, shame and fear. But if you speak to people appropriately, if you are persistent, you are patient, you’re able to be versatile, you’re authentic, you’re interested, you’re listening, you get more information.

Speaker 2 (11:53)
Absolutely. I guess also the threshold for when you would call it unfair is a bit different. Well, in England you can’t ask a question twice. Why in Vietnam they’re happy if you beat you, but you don’t beat so hard.

Speaker 1 (11:59)
What do mean?

Well, that’s, mean, we were talking about this in the break, the idea of asking a question twice. I agree. I don’t think you can ask the same question twice. But I think what we do, which I was talking about a minute ago in the UK, we’re reticent to ask a question which has been unanswered. And I wouldn’t do that. If you said something to me now and I didn’t understand what you’d said, not because you being deceptive, I’d want more. Deceptive. And you wouldn’t think I was being oppressive in asking for it. If I kept asking you the same question, then that would be oppressive.

But if I’ve not properly explored what you said in, a spirit of curiosity and interest, then I think it’s perfectly okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:42)
Respect.

you very early engaged with practitioners in your research, which is something that is still with you as a researcher, that you have a very close and trustful relationship with practitioners.

Speaker 1 (12:56)
God, 1991 I think I did my undergraduate degree. Is that right? Anyway, it when the Silence of the Lambs was out.

and all the cool kids wanted to be offender profilers. And I worked with David Cantor, who’s an interesting man. We won’t go there. For a few years, and I was at the university of Surrey and all the cool kids wanted to be offender profilers. And I started looking at this stuff and most of it was complete bullshit. I’d come off the back of three years of academic study, rigorous adherence to scientific methods and people wandering around turning up at crime scene saying, think,

It’s a postal worker who hates his mum or whatever bullshit was involved. And David bless him came in whilst I was still a master’s student actually, and gave her gave me a huge pile of papers. And actually this developed my interest in interviewing and decision making. And it was a big pile of papers about that big. And I was only a master’s student as well. I was a lot younger than obviously. And he said, this is an undercover operation and it’s everything.

every letter, phone call and meeting between an undercover operative called Lizzie James and the target, Colin Stagg. And it was in the wake of the Rachel Nichell murder, who most of you are far too young to remember, who was murdered on Wimbledon Common in front of a three-year-old son. It was a horrific murder case. And there was a psychologist involved who was allegedly an offender profiler who gave a profile which was very ambiguous and vague and could have been pretty much anyone.

Colin Stagg was lifted for this, interviewed badly and an undercover operation was set up in which they provided a 30 year old woman undercover called code name Lizzie James who basically, this is a very short version of the story, develops a relationship with Colin Stagg and was kind of offering herself to him if he gave admissions about this offense, which actually he never did.

Speaker 2 (14:46)
Because

sure he was man enough for her.

Speaker 1 (14:48)
Yeah, exactly. So I did an analysis of this whole undercover operation and I was appalled by it. It was clearly coercive, corruptive. was all the confirmation bias that you would expect. The profile was bogus. Anyway, it never got to court. It was thrown out of the voire d’erre by law chief Justice Ognor, who described it as the grossest conduct and an overzealous police investigation.

And what was interesting about it was from a decision-making point of view, it was all over the place. It was like, this is the guy that we think it is. And we’ll look for all the evidence to confirm it. And the interview was bad. And you could clearly demonstrate statistically that the guy was being led, clearly being led. And my early career actually was directed, I got a

I realized I got a name for myself when I did various court cases and I was up in West York and they said, you know what they call you, you? I said, no. They said, you’re called the hatchet man. And I said, what does that mean? They said, because we get you in when a load of bogus psychologists have made up a load of bullshit and we get you into basically destroy, straighten up these dodgy theories. And I did a lot of that in the early 90s.

which was a good experience because it made me realize what rigor you needed if you were going to contribute to something which was meaningful and practical and helping the police. It better be what it is that you’re saying it is. And unfortunately, psychology, supposedly experimental studies that look good. Well, as we all know, there was a big, you know, sort of debate around the worth of psychology a while ago about its merits and its applicability and its replicability.

So certainly in the early 90s, a lot of my research was directed at basically dissecting problems with other theories. And I wanted to be not an offender profiler, but that interested me. But I soon realized, you know, I’d come off the back of a degree at University College London, which was very rigorous. And there was all this bogus stuff going on. But that was the early 90s.

Speaker 2 (16:43)
Yeah, exactly. Because I was fortunate enough, to have a lunch with, David. because I was considering then, if it was possible for me as an Norwegian police officer to do the Masters, And then we came into that he wanted to…

Speaker 1 (16:54)
there.

Speaker 2 (16:58)
a warners of what would be expected from us if they invested in master. And he said, I remember he said something like that. Remember guys, what your bosses want you to come back with is this neat, nice suitcase. And inside it is a big green who did it button. And he said, just, just be aware that’s not what I’m going to give you. I said, well, where are you going to give us then? And he said,

Well, I guess what we can give you is that we will help you so that over time you will help the Norwegian police think differently about their problems. I think this was very good advice.

Speaker 1 (17:36)
he’s a brilliant mind really in generating a new area of psychology, investigative psychology, which has not been present before. And he definitely brought new ideas to the field and there’s been progression, as you know, in the profiling arena. are studies now that can help us with geo profiling, there are risk management and David’s an awkward spiky character, but I respect and admire

you know

Speaker 2 (18:01)
I’m personally very thankful for his encouragement and for me warmth that he actually gave that time. I also remember another thing you said, you did this research on offender profiling and getting back to decision making. Because I remember what David said, well, what’s the alternative to if offender profiling doesn’t work, what should you do instead? And he said, better thinking.

You have to, you know, absolutely get better at doing what you’re doing. And because typically you’re overseeing pretty obvious stuff and the cases we’re looking at, there are obvious information if you’re overseeing or that you lost or haven’t addressed or… So that was the other thing, know, strengthen the way you think. And I think you also wrote that, you and him, in a research paper.

for the home office. I’m not getting into quoting you, but I think it was around late 90s, 1998, 99. The reason I remember it so vividly is that you said, I’m done research on decision-making together with my brilliant supervisors, Per Anders, Gunnar Öhl and Karl Ask at the University of Gothenburg, who you were working with at the time. I was thinking we need a model.

for how to think as a detective, just as a PEACE model or the Orbit that you have to have some kind of system to help you. What are you going to do then? Well, that’s quite generic one. And there was a quote from one of your reports that actually gave me that idea. What could that starting point was? B. And I think it goes something like this.

Good thinking is characterized by a thorough search for an alternative without favorizing the one already on mind.

Speaker 1 (19:44)
Cool, really good.

Speaker 2 (19:46)
It’s got a full name on it.

Speaker 1 (19:47)
I’m very impressed with that. Did I write? You’ve got a much better memory of my past than I do.

Speaker 2 (19:52)
I have to say, Laurence, I’m very thankful for that phrase because there are some Norwegian leading detectives in the room. think they also can testify that this became kind of the centerpiece of the decision-making part in the Norwegian version of the PEACE training. So this kind of actively identifying these alternative explanations of the evidence, different stories fit the same evidence?

And can we actually actively identify them in the interview? Can we actively rule it out or can it replace the suspicion? Where do you find more, you know, inference to the best explanation? What explanation does best fit the available evidence? So that became very important in the Norwegian and probably more important than the interview model itself.

Speaker 1 (20:34)
Well, mean, you I mean, as you know, you develop that work and as you’ll know, there’s a big litch on decision making. I mean, I think the only psychologist that’s won the Nobel Peace Prize is Dan Kahneman. And funnily enough, not for his work on decision making, because for all economics. But you know, all that Kahneman and Tversky stuff around confirmation bias, heuristics, et cetera, et cetera, you know, is all good stuff. And you will have drawn on that in your thesis. So, but look, I mean,

What I was interested in in the early days, because it sounded sexy, was what was going on inside the criminal’s mind. That was what it was all about in the early 90s. But you soon realized, or I realized, that I think you can make a bigger contribution if you understand what’s in the police officer’s mind. How they think, how they gather information, that I think is more important in many ways. And the two things in combination can either be done really badly or really well.

If you’ve got an open-minded police officer that goes into an interview and interviews correctly, then you’ve got a result. If you’ve got a closed-minded police officer that’s using confirmation bias and then coercive techniques, they’re going to get what they always thought they were going to get in the first place. But you know, that’s a tough place to be, it?

Speaker 2 (21:37)
Definitely,

So you actually flew in single-handedly to Gothenburg and spent two days with me, with Per Anders and Carl to kind of pin down how can this be done? Can we actually compare decision-making? Because I wanted to compare English and Norwegian detectives. It’s impossible actually to, across sectors, across countries, across jurisdiction, to compare good decision-making.

Speaker 1 (22:28)
And were they very different?

Speaker 2 (22:30)
They were,

I remember the first news that you should do this in the, the, in the, in the hydro suite. And I challenged that said, well, that’d have to be an advantage to the Brits because they’re to that. So we decided to do it outside of it. But what we found that Carl in those studies that we wanted them to see, can you identify the possible inclinations?

good thinking is. So you said, well, that’s good Ivar but don’t do that without a gold standard. It’s just, it’s not the number of hypotheses, it’s the quality of them. So that was another good advice that I picked up. I don’t, you don’t like phrasing here, but that was a very important advice. And then we do the Delfi process on identifying, what are the…

explanations than an unenviable person case and rapidly came to the agreement that there’s only six. There are only six possible explanations why someone disappeared. And all of them have underlying investigative needs. So they’re appointing to information needs. So we also asked them to see, you tell us what investigative actions should you do? And when we did that, the Brits came out with an average of 80 %

the gold standard, whilst the Norwegians had 41.

Speaker 1 (23:49)
what do you think that was?

Speaker 2 (23:50)
No training, no feedback, no training. Just like you and me. Or very little training. So that more training in England, they were more fit. I think, you know, that you have to have to rationalize why you’re doing this. There’s someone looking over their shoulder on the accreditation system. You know that when my plan…

Speaker 1 (23:51)
No train.

Speaker 2 (24:09)
is 24 hours old, someone will knock on this door and come on and check it. And if it’s not good, they will report on it. And if it’s not good after there are so and so many hours, there’s no days they’ll come back. I think mainly in England, they this to kind of stop them from spending money on bad investigations, but it also meant that they, you know, we

Speaker 1 (24:30)
Do they

have a different volume of cases though? the Norwegian officers add less exposure to cases maybe?

Speaker 2 (24:35)
I’ll be obvious. So, so, so, so you get bigger exposure, but there’s also the fact that if you, and it’s quite obvious when we can, I didn’t hypothesis it. was thinking that the difference would be not that big, then we realized there is no.

certification, is no reach, the recertification or anything. So there are, of course, there were some of the Norwegians who did really good, but there were some who were really poor. So the variance was extreme. then we were thinking this, you need a system. You actually need an accreditation to be a proper detective and you need to kind of retrain and re-prove that you actually still are up for it.

So that’s what came out of that research. interestingly enough, the Norwegian police directorate picked up on that. So now you have, we are slowly moving towards a system where you need the training before you get the job and you also need to get that kind of…

Speaker 1 (25:32)
Are

you having increasingly young detectives though? Because I think in the UK that’s true with us that they’re taking on because of resources and finances and everything else. The younger people are taking on quite high profile cases now, not necessarily with enough experience to sit down. I mean, we did a study on rape investigation and it was quite interesting. One of the manipulations that we did, it was a similar sort of study. We gave a…

A scenario to individuals around a rape investigation, we did develop a gold standard in much the same way in looking at the quality of the decisions. And to half the group, we said, right, I’m really sorry, but you’re under bit of time pressure today, so you’re gonna have to do this quickly. Even though we gave them exactly the same amount of time as the other group that we didn’t say that to. And what was quite interesting was individuals that had been investigating rape more than seven years. So you could have one officer that had been a detective for 10 years.

and done seven years in rape. First another officer that had been a detective for 20 years and had done six years on rape and that person would do less well. And it’s a bit like this is a random jump, but it’s a bit like the studies on people that can assess the quality of There’s actually studies on people that can look at pigs and say that’s gonna be a decent pig to eat. But it doesn’t transfer to cows.

Now that might sound random, but my point is it’s about domain specific knowledge. Exactly. So you could have been doing missing people. Exactly. For 20 years and six years on rape, but you’re not going to do as well as a person that’s been doing eight years on rape. Only. one of the things we don’t know much about at all is what the variation is in those different sorts of investigations. But seven years seemed to be a predictor.

Another predictor was a thing called need for closure, which is an individual difference to do with how tolerant you are of ambiguity. And we found that people that were highly decisive, but also tolerant of ambiguity tended to also do well on that task. And the other thing was we took a measure of fluid intelligence, which is the thing Raven’s progressive matrices, which is non-numeric, non-verbal, which is to do with how people recognize patterns.

So it’s pattern, recognizing complex patterns in information, open-mindedness, but decisiveness, lots of experience. And then the other thing, I mentioned this manipulation around time pressure. What we found was that the people that were particularly good at making the decisions, when they were under time pressure, did all the things that they had to do and were able to push out the redundant stuff quite quickly. Whereas people that had less than seven years,

weren’t very decisive, weren’t tolerant of ambiguity and had low fluid intelligence, got panicked by simply being told they had less time and didn’t do all the critical stuff. So it was quite interesting. in terms of, you’ve got to have some degree of experience. Intelligence is a predictor and of course training and exposure. that’s, mean, the other, sorry, I’m waffling there. The other thing that I’ve got increasingly interested in is

How do you get people to get better at doing a complex technical skill without having to make them go through seven years of dipping hit? Exactly. So, mean, you mentioned Hydra there, which is, I was involved in the early days of Hydra, which is a big immersive scenario based learning thing. And that was great. But I’ve got very interested in the concept of micro learning, the short learning, but repetitive learning. So,

There’s something, there’s emerging literature and micro-learning which might be relevant to interviewing, might be relevant to decision making. How do you get people to acquire a complex technical skill that normally takes a lot of time to acquire?

Speaker 2 (29:04)
So little bit of tennis every week instead of once a year.

Speaker 1 (29:06)
Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re learning tennis, do I spend eight hours with you and then disallow you from doing it again for another year? Or do I make sure you practice 10 minutes a day every day for three weeks?

Speaker 2 (29:16)
Do you think, as I said, the research on British and Norwegian homicide detectives showed, at least suggest, that certification, that you actually need to do something to get and to keep the certificate. Is that something we could consider the interview as also the interviewing world?

Speaker 1 (29:32)
depends on how it’s certified I is my sure answer to that

Speaker 2 (29:36)
Exactly. you know, probably you could think about it. You know, we have accreditation systems for all kinds of stuff. It’s mostly technical stuff, but also for processes. the interview is a process. And there are certain steps that shouldn’t be ignored.

Speaker 1 (29:51)
Yeah, I mean, it’s like anything, isn’t it? You want to make sure that the measure is a fair measure of what it is that you know that improves performance. It’s like, I mean, not that we need to get political again, but I mean, certain governments, who I won’t name, have over-engineered mechanisms to metricize performance. And that can also be a problem.

So my answer is it depends on the metric. It depends on the measure. It depends on how onerous it is and it depends what the intent is. The idea of measuring is clearly important. The idea of oversight and performance and scrutiny is important. But again, going back to the stuff on decision making, I’ve certainly, well, I mean, even going back to the things that we were talking about, the over-tensitiveness of interviewing, you want to make sure that it’s proportionate, that it’s fair, that it’s regulated and it’s not overdone.

Because the other stuff that I did on research on accountability was, I mean, as you know, my other areas of interest is critical instance decision-making and decision inertia. So in high profile instance where all options look bad, the worst thing you can do is do nothing, but that happens frequently. So, you know, we can all think of countless examples of problematic decision-making where people have been too slow to act or haven’t acted at all. And we know from the research.

Speaker 2 (30:48)
Thank

Speaker 1 (31:03)
that part of that is to do with the perception of accountability for owning a bad decision. And therefore, you know, I’ve got a cataclysmic option and I’ve got a bad one, but I don’t want to own either of these, so I’ll do nothing. So actually the bad one is better than the cataclysmic one. So, sorry, I’m waffling a bit, but yeah, I mean, think certification is a good idea, degree of scrutiny, as long as it’s a fair measurement and not over them.

Speaker 2 (31:26)
I think also we’re hosted this interview by Davidhorn and I think also technology can play a part. If you want to test people and want to certify people, you should be reliable and testable and consistent. that technology might play a part in that, whether we can document that skill and test it consistently.

and then probably it could be a future to see if it can be also effectively, you know.

Speaker 1 (31:53)
I mean anything that helps the observation of the detail of what’s going on in the interview room and you know we were all watching a presentation earlier about transcription and translation and technology to help observe all of that sort of has obviously got to be helpful.

Speaker 2 (32:07)
Obviously, and I guess you couldn’t have done your research on Orbit without recordings, could you?

Speaker 1 (32:12)
Extremely difficult. extremely difficult. Nearly all of our stuff was audiovisual. Some of it was tape only. I don’t think any of it was transcription only. I think all of it was at least audio. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:23)
I definitely think, we’re also talking about this on the summit, AI, how that can help us. I think some of the decision inertia which you find in your decision, critical decision making research, is also…

hampering interviews massively in interviews. So interviewers don’t know what to ask for. They don’t follow. They’re not able to kind of follow what does this mean? In my case right now. And you can teach them as much interview techniques as you want to. But if they don’t know what they want to know, how do they know what to ask? And then they start going in circles and then they annoy the suspect and you know,

Speaker 1 (32:38)
is also was.

Speaker 2 (33:02)
Fuck up the intro.

Speaker 1 (33:03)
Well, mean, anything that can help reduce the cognitive load is going to be massively helpful. Me and Børge have spoken about this. Any technology that can help organize the information or help give you a bit of a nudge or visualize it in an important way or just give you access to something that is going to be faster, all of that’s going to definitely be helpful. I mean, we’re doing bits of, not that I’m diverting off into another realm now, but we’re doing some work with DARPA.

around the use of AI in medical triage and mass casualty incidents. So, you know, when you’re getting flow within a hospital that gets overwhelmed because of a shooting incident, at what point do you hand over autonomy to a system? you know, looking at all of that, I think it’s important, but anyone that’s been involved in AI, either as an ethicist or a legal practitioner or a psychologist, will know that one of the important things is that you’ve got to keep the human in the loop somewhere, because what

what people are uncomfortable with is if they don’t know what the AI is doing when they’re doing it. So when we spoke to surgeons about AI around mass casualty, they said, yeah, yeah, we’re definitely in support of AI if it can take the load off us and if we get a surgeon can help us. But we want to know why it’s triaging in that way, which is perfectly reasonable. Exactly. So the AI interviewing stuff is quite interesting. I’ve been playing around with various different chat bots to see if I can lie to it successfully.

Well, I won’t name particular ones. There was one that I was really impressed by actually. I can say this, can’t I? Inflection. Has anyone tried inflection? Have you tried it now? It’s quite impressive. I actually felt bad saying goodbye to it. But what was interesting about it, a lot of the other ones that I tried, tried to pretend that they were human, which obviously I knew weren’t. And I say,

Sorry, I’m diverted now, you can cut this bit. But I was chatting to one of them and he said, Oh, hi Laurence, what are you interested in? I said, one of the things I like is artwork. And they said, Oh really? And I said, yeah. And I said, you like artwork? And they said, yeah, I quite like Picasso. And I thought, well, that’s bullshit. You’ve never seen a Picasso. I said, where have you seen a Picasso? Oh, I haven’t seen one. And so it was lying to it. was trying to do what we see interviewers do badly, which is be congruent with me and like me. But the inflection one didn’t lie to me. It recognized that it was a robot.

and it was straight, it said I’ve never seen any art in my life, I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I thought okay, I can live with that. So you know what I mean? So from an interviewing point of view, I felt it was relatable, because it wasn’t trying to…

Speaker 2 (35:19)
somehow bullshitting, yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:20)
And it was quite good at metaphor. I said, well, we’ve been talking for about an hour now. I said, if I was an animal, what would I be? And it came up with an animal and gave quite a good description as to why. I thought it was quite clever. And it seemed rational within what I’ve, I know we’re diverting wildly. What animal was that? Octopus. So you’ve got your, you know, you’ve got your tentacles on a lot of things and you’re sliding around all over the place and quite mercurial, which is what I’m doing now, I guess. But I…

But that was an inventive, imaginative metaphor that I could relate to. Anyway, we’re going off PEACE. I mean, in terms of AI interviewing, I guess we’ll get there at some point. Because it’s never going to get tired. It’s never going to get pissed off. know, two things that are going to happen to interviewers, I’m now fatigued.

Speaker 2 (36:00)
And will, last question, will do you think, Laurence, at some time, robots or AI replace the human interviewer?

Speaker 1 (36:08)
It’s completely conceivable. I mean, even if you think about cognitive empathy, you know, if you’re, if I’m interviewing a 19 year old female that’s gone to Syria and had that experience and I’ve, will have a limited knowledge of it, an AI potentially would know every road that this person might have traveled. So I’ll have much richer, denser knowledge than I will.

So in terms of knowledge it will have it, it won’t get tired like I would either of it. So I don’t know, potentially.

Speaker 2 (36:42)
It’s like you said earlier, technically a robot can probably fly an airplane safer than a human pilot.

Speaker 1 (36:51)
Almost certainly,

Speaker 2 (36:52)
So it might be the same.

Speaker 1 (36:54)
Potentially,

Speaker 2 (36:55)
Thank you very much, Professor Laurence Alison

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s an honor to welcome Bragi Guðbrandsson to the podcast Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. We are in Reykjavik, Iceland. And the reason we are here today is that Iceland was the first country in the world that came up with a solution for how to take care of kids in difficult situation and in criminal settings that was called the Barnahus Model. And you, Bragi was deeply involved in this development. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, that’s a pleasure. And thank you for taking the time to speak to me. Well, Barnahus has been, my professional mission for past 25 years or so. And you ask how did it come about? Well, the Barnahus is about sexually abused, victims of, child victims of sexual abuse. And I started my engagement this topic, in the early 1980s, it was in last century. I became a director of local social services and I stayed there for 10 years. I came across a number of cases where children had been sexually molested. I was myself lost in how to best deal with these cases. You know, hands on feel the pain of the children and the horrific situation that this met for these child victims. And from the very start, I started to speculate on how we could do better for these kids. In 1990, I became the counselor to the Minister of Social Affairs and when he asked me to be his councillor, I said I would do so if I would have the opportunity to work on the reform in child protection legislation in Iceland, which he happily accepted. And that led to the set up of the government’s Agency for Child Protection in 1995. I was appointed the director general of that agency. 

This Agency had main function to coordinate all child protection work Iceland, the whole of Iceland. The child protection system was overtly decentralized. We had 180 communes or local authorities in Iceland. And in each local authority, we used to have child protection committee. Over half of these committees had less than 300 people in populations. You just could imagine how really impossible it was to provide professional intervention into complicated issues like child sexual abuse. Besides, the time, Iceland was in denial on the very existence of child sexual abuse. But one of the first decisions I made as the Director General of the Government of Asian Child Protection was to do a research on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the country. And the outcome of that research came as a surprise to all of us here in Iceland. There were a lot more cases that nobody had sort of envisaged. We had over 100 cases per year being dealt with in the different sectors, society, by the child protection, by the police, by the medical profession, and so on. But this outcome of this research demonstrated the complete failure of the system to deal with these cases as it sort of revealed the lack of collaboration between the different agencies that were responsible for dealing with this. It demonstrated the lack of professionalism, lack of or absence of guidelines for working these cases. And it really demonstrated that children were subjected to repetitive interviews with the consequent, you know, re-victimization that this involves. But you also could find cases where, you know, children were not even talked to because they’re in some parts of the country they didn’t really believe that the children were good witnesses or they didn’t have the capacity to speak to  children. So this was more or less in total chaos. There was no therapeutic support available in the country. There was no expertise in terms of medical in examination of child victims. So there was a huge work to do. 

One of the things that I felt in particular was bad was that children were dragged to the courts if an indictment was made. Children would need to give their court testimony in the courthouse and being subjected to cross-examination where the child had to face the accused person. This was of course very intimidating for the child witnesses. Now, this was the sort of scenario at hand in Iceland in 1995, 1996. I came to the conclusion that if we were going to do something about this, we need to do it centrally. Iceland is a small country with only at the time just over 300,000 people, just over 70,000 children. So we couldn’t build up these competence centers all around the place. I decided that we would set up a of a competence center that will serve children the whole of the country, whole witnesses, child victims and witnesses in the whole country. And we would need firstly to have expertise in terms of forensic interviewing. That was number one, because without the child’s disclosure, we can’t do really very much. So that was one. And number two, we needed to have a facility for medical evaluation, although child victims oftentimes do not have any physical evidence due to the fact that most of the cases we deal with are historic sexual abuse happened in the very past and the body has this great capacity for healing, so you wouldn’t have any evidence. It was necessary and also for, you know, give the child the whole sort of physical checkup not only look for the evidence, but also support the child and the child’s concern over own physical health, because often time child witnesses, they are concerned about being in any way harmed due to the abuse, even though they are perfectly healthy. So this is one part. And the third part was, of course, the therapeutic part. Now, the idea was really to have all the different professions work together within the one roof. Of course, this idea did not fall from the sky. It sort of developed discussions, developed from what was happening in the world at the time. That was very remarkable, particularly with regard to forensic interviews as a response to the sort of historical, or I should rather say, hysterical child abuse cases in the nurseries in America, Canada, even in Europe. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If I’m not wrong, this is your area, Bragi but, I’ve read that in the 80s, it came up a lot of stories. Maybe it can be social development in many of the Northern Western democracies, this came up in a large scale. And some of them were proven to be true, some of them were actually proven to be false. So I guess that was kind of the environment of the time that this is coming up. It’s surfacing. We don’t know the scale of it. And it’s also, as you said, there is stigma here. And we have a problem to establish the fact. And in the chaos, I think, if I can summarize your observation, the ones who are truly suffering in that chaos is actually the kids. And they probably were, either if they were a true victim or not.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah. And even if the abuse didn’t happen, they became victimized to this constant interrogation that they were subjected to.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

By the process itself.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, by the very system was trying to protect them. But I think you are right. Obviously, there were real cases of child sexual abuse within the framework of play schools, nurseries and so on. We know that, of course, that pedophilias, they go where the children are, nursery schools and are of course places that they go to look for prey. But on the other hand, what we do know now is that during this period in the 80s and 90s, there were a of false accusations or mis-interpretations and people were scared, parents were scared, well maybe naturally, know, they had heard about these cases, they’ve heard about pedophilia and sexual crimes and they were, they wanted of course to protect their children, that’s quite natural, they listened to their children but perhaps, you know, during a certain stage in the child’s rebirth, the child becomes sort of, I wouldn’t say obsessed, but interested in its gender identity and that includes genitals and breasts and things like that. They talk about it and it’s very easy for parents to misunderstand or to interpret children in the wrong way and not understand correctly what the message they’re trying to convey. These issues are so complicated to sort of detect. But of course, trained forensic interviewers that we know today who know how to elicit the child’s nanoteeth in a correct manner by applying evidence-based forensic protocol, avoiding the suggestibility that a normal being would probably be guilty of when talking with a child. We can now establish whether there is a real cause there for concern or not. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You did something that I wasn’t aware of. You said you did some research on it here in Iceland. Can you tell a little bit more about why you did it and what you found?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well yes, the research was basically on the structural aspect of it, how the different agencies in society that were responsible for dealing with child sexual abuse, how they handle themselves in these cases. So I looked at the child protection, looked at the police and I looked at the prosecution and the court system and of course the medical system. Now out of the 100 cases, well the child protection should have been dealing with all of them because the law stipulated mandatory reporting to the child protection. However, the child protection system only knew about 60 % of these cases. And the police only knew about the 40 % of the cases. The prosecution only received less than 30 % of the cases. And the courts they only got, well, less than 10%. That was really roughly the proportion of the cases how it was divided. Now, why didn’t the child protection get all of these cases like they should have?  Well, I think it was because we had 180 child protection committees all around the country. The police was a bit skeptical of referring cases to these child protection committees because they knew they did not have any professional capacities to deal with it. So they thought it would probably be better if they did it on their own. The child protection didn’t contact the police either in their cases that they were dealing with. Why was that? Well, I suppose that they simply didn’t know how to deal with it. They may have done so informally. At least it was not registered in any case. Possibly they were, because of the state of denial that the whole society was in, they were probably not sure if this was really a case or not. Or if it was a case, they didn’t really know how to handle it, how to speak to children, how to talk to children. They didn’t really know how to work it through. And this is really what I was basically concerned with. To refer the kids to medical evaluations. Well, there was no specific, there was no specialization there. You could go to your family doctor or to the hospital, but then you would need to have at the time, we found out that you really would need to have some visible injury, so it was really a chaos. We were trying to work out, trying to map the actual procedure, but there wasn’t any. There was no procedure in the whole country. So that was really our main sort of findings that we needed to do, a professional guidelines on how to respond when you had this suspicion. That was number one. And number two, would have to have highly qualified forensic interviewers. And then, of course, the medical setting and so on. But at this was before the Google. So you didn’t really know if this structure of sort inter or multi-agency collaboration did exist somewhere in the world at the time. I did write and phone to my colleagues in the other Scandinavian countries and I did try to read as much as I could, but I didn’t find any place where this collaboration was taking place. Until a bit later on when by pure accident I saw an advert on the internet, in fact, on the conference in Huntsville, Alabama, of all places in the US. What caught my eyes was that there was the concept inter-agency collaboration in child sexual abuse. 

When I saw it, I decided I should go there. Then I learned about the children’s advocacy centers in the USA. And they were actually based on the same concept. And it started in the Southern States of the USA and it was in its infancy. This was a great inspiration for me. I could see there how these different agencies collaborated and worked under one roof. 

They had medical people coming over to do the medical evaluation, and they had therapists on a permanent basis there. Well, this would be exactly what we would need here in Iceland. It would fit nicely to serve the whole country, but I wanted to take it further. 

I felt what’s lacking in the USA model was number one, was an NGO. It’s a private…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a lot of things in the States.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So there was no obligation part of the police or the child protection, so I had to refer cases to it. And secondly, and that was very important, that you didn’t take the child’s for court purposes in these children’s advocacy centers. This was basically done for the police for investigative interviews and for the criminal investigation. And then the child needed to wait maybe a year or two until the actual court procedure.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Then appearing courts.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And then appearing court, yes and being cross-examined and subjected to cross-examination of the task. So, this was something which I did not like very much, but I wondered if we could sort of do it differently to take the good elements and to strengthen the model by number one, to have it operated by the public authorities to integrate into the welfare system. So it would be with the corresponding sort of mandate of the different agencies to refer cases to the partners. Secondly, if we could have the court judges come along and join us in this project. 

It was at this time that invented the term Barnaheussora. This was something which being used a bit before. When this slowly developed, we got some support from them, particularly from the prosecution. The prosecution particularly saw the potential in this. We then tried to have the set up as being the default procedure here in Iceland. At the time we had the legislation that court judges could not touch the case or come near the case during the investigative phase. It was only after the indictment had been made that they could come into the case. But at the time, Norway had a system which was called Dommeravhør, which was kind of an exception from the general rule that court judges should not be involved in the investigative phase, where they were supposed to take the child’s during the pre-trial states. Now, this is an arrangement that Norway has no longer. However, it was the solution that we found that was to have the court judges to take the child’s statement during the pre-trial state.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a subpoena, in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It was only limited, the role of the court judge was only limited to that particular part. The idea really was to fulfill the basic principle of the due process.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

You know, the due process consists of two, more or two dimensions. Number one is the evidentiary immediacy, so that the court judge would be able to see or sense the evidence directly without any interference. So by meeting the child and listening to the child, that requirement was fulfilled. And secondly, the requirement of the due process, which meant that means that the accused person must have the opportunity or his defense contradict, yes, to ask the child witness. So what the arrangement sort of came out of this was that we would have the child in Barnahus in one room with a forensic interviewer. And then in a different room, you would have all the representatives of the different agencies, the child protection, the police, the prosecution, and the defense. And this would be done under the auspices of court judge. So they would be able to observe the interviewer live. 

Following the interview, which was carried out by trained interviewer, according to a forensic interview protocol, the defence had the opportunity to ask the child questions, to offer alternative explanations and so on. This would all be video recorded and the video would be then accepted as the chief evidence, main evidence during the court procedure, the court’s proceeding, if an indictment would be made. So this was an arrangement that we sort of set up from the very start.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So then saving the children in general for potential revictimisation, but by having to appear for cross-examination in court. So that was the level that you thought was missing in the US.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, absolutely. In this system, the child is only subjected to one when the child has given his or her statement, then the child does not need to be concerned about the justice system anymore. The child has done with the justice system. Now, I that there are other ways to do this. I know, for example, the other Nordic countries, including, for example, Norway, the court judges, they’re not involved in this procedure. But it is the prosecution who is responsible for the procedure. The defense will have this opportunity. In Norway, you have two systems. First, you have the interview with the child where all the different agencies are involved. But the defense is not there. Once the child has given his or her statement, then the perpetrator is interrogated or interviewed. And then you have the second interview, which is often referred to as a supplementary interview, which focuses basically on the diversion or the different account, the disagreement, the differences in the natterchiefs of the child and the accused. 

You get about 80-90 % agreement, then it’s about 20-10 % disagreement. So the second interview of the child focuses on this diverse narrative. Then the child is over with the judicial part. Both of these interviews are recorded and they can be played in court if an indictment is made. So the difference between the Icelandic system now or Banahus interview and the other Scandinavian is this one versus two. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If we then go back again to when you started, you were in the Alabama in 1997. And you were in position, as I understand both, because you had historically seen the problem. You had an idea about the And based on that, the Barnahus was established as the multi-agency center for potentially victimized children. How was that received, because I imagine one thing is that you say the chaos and the 180 different agencies and of course varying level I would guess of competency and capacity, but I guess also one of the fundamental problems when it comes is kind of the all the different government agencies have different budgets. So how was this received and dealt with on a government level?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, once we had carried out this research I mentioned, and we had seen that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was as high as the outcome of that research demonstrated. I think the Icelandic society wasn’t a bit of a shock, you know, because they really didn’t believe in Iceland at the time, the population, that child sexual abuse was an issue. Child sexual abuse was something which was, you know, infighting the States or the UK and the larger societies, but not in Iceland. So when this information came out, there was a bit of a shock among the nation. And there was a great debate in the parliament that something needed to be done. And which was to be expected. My agency, the government’s agency for child protection, was entrusted to put forward proposals to reform the system. So I really got the mandate to do whatever I thought was necessary to improve the situation.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Fantastic. 

 Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And so I looked for support from the prosecution, from the head of the university hospital in Iceland, from the police chief here in Reykjavik, and from the Federation of the Social Directors of Social Services in Iceland and so on. And they were mostly positive. Not all of them, but mostly there were. Particularly, I’m happy to say the prosecution was happy with it because they realized the problem, particularly in terms of the criminal investigation, that the police at the time, they had not the necessary training or the capacity to interview children. So they saw immediately the potentialities there for improving the criminal aspect of it. So they were fine. They were interested from the very start. But it was a different history with medical professions. At the time, they could do the medical exams through, by the application of a state of the art equipment, video colposcope, which we had never heard of here. And most of the kids who were examined in university hospital in Iceland, they had to be, well, they used anesthesia. They put them to sleep before they did the examination, which is not a very child-friendly way to do a medical evaluation and not very effective either. So when I approached him, I sort of asked them if they were willing to join us in Barnahus, if we could set up a medical suite there. They were not extremely keen on that and said, well, we need to have this option to use anesthesia in many cases and we can only do that in hospital. Then we don’t have the video colposcope, we don’t have the money to buy it. So I said, look, if I can finance it and I can buy it and put it in Barnahus, would you come? And they said, yes, then we would come. So I bought it. And when it came to Barnahus, I contacted them again and said, now we had the video colposcope in the medical room. Now I want you to come and start doing the medical evaluation. 

The first thing they said was, please bring the video colposcope to our new children’s hospital. We want to do it rather there… So they tried to resist. But in the end, they became so fascinated by the way in which children could be then examined and the possibility they had to communicate with the child in this child-friendly environment. They could perform their obligation in a much more effective way than before. Soon they became the strongest advocate for Barnahus. They pointed out that in Barnahus, children are so relaxed, they were not stressed in the muscles they needed to examine. They were so relaxed and it was so easy to examine the children compared to what was before that they became the strongest advocates for Barnahus very soon afterwards.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I guess if you reflect upon it, you have probably two of the most powerful historical professions.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You have the lawyers.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The lawyers.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And the medical doctors.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So making them be able to invest and communicate. I guess you must have taken some diplomatic skills.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, it took a while. It helped me that Iceland is a small society and I had been a councillor to the Ministry of Social Affairs. So I knew these people personally. And that was something which was helped me a great deal. So they were ready to do it as a favor to, you know, as a pilot for maybe one or two years or so and see how it would evolve. So I think that was a part of the explanation as well. But they were not all in the legal professions who were happy about this. The defense wasn’t happy. Because they said, Barnahus, it’s not like a courthouse. The courthouse is a neutral ground, but Barnahus is biased. It’s publicly advocating children’s rights for children. So it’s not an objective place to do this part of the court procedures. But on the other hand, we argued, well, you know, the child is not a partner in court case. The court case is between the prosecution on the one hand and the accused person on the other. So the child is only a witness and it should be to the benefit of the innocent accused person to provide environment for the child so that enhance the possibility that the child will tell the truth. And in the end, they bought that, that as a child was not part of actual court proceedings, other than having a status as a witness. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I can see the argument, of again, as you have to, some eggs if you want to make an omelette.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And it depends on you see it. Either you acknowledge the fact that sexual abuse towards children actually do occur.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But you don’t know in advance against who? And then you advocated a safer neutral space for where we investigate and take care of this. well, I know I can hear myself, I’m advocating for it, but I it’s interesting to hear that there were sceptical voices.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, it is. And it’s quite natural. It was something new and they had been doing it, you know, from the very beginning, the old way. And they knew that procedure. But this was something which was very revolutionary in a sense to have the child in a house, you know, outside the courthouse somewhere in a in a house in a residential area, to have a social worker or a psychologist who was trained to do the forensic interview and so on. And they had to be prepared to let go of some of the power they had in terms of controlling the situation in which the child gave his or her testimony. That was quite natural. But they did try to appeal those decisions or to take the statements in the Barnahus to the courts and all the way to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court said, our law of the procedural says that court procedures should take place in the courthouse. As a general rule, it’s up to the individual judge to decide where to take the statements of the witness. And there were, you know, presidents, for example, taking statements of prisoners in prisons or taking statements of people who were hospitalised, mental hospitals and so on. So there were presidents and if the court judge accepted and wanted to take the child statement in the courthouse, he had the power to do so. During the first years from 98 to 2002 or so, there was a lot of uncertainty concerning this while the system was trying to adapt to the new idea of Barnahus. But the worst scenario was however, the number of court judges, particularly Reykjavik, that refused to go to Barnahus and would rather take the child’s statement in the courthouse. So when this law was sort of changed, court judges got this responsibility to take the child’s statement during the pretrial state. Most of them in Reykjavík, they simply wanted to do it in the Reykjavík quarters. I recall inviting them up to the Barnahus to show it to them and said, look how wonderful this is. And they said, well, they responded, yes, this is wonderful. We may possibly use this for the next two or three months while we set up a child-friendly room in the courthouse, because we do prefer to take the child’s testimony in the  courtroom. So it didn’t really look very good in very beginning. But what happened was that the court judges outside of Reykjavik, you know, they did not have this facility in their courthouses and there were no plans of setting up in the child-friendly rooms at their courts. So they thought, well, why don’t we try it? And they decided to come one after another. And soon there were more and more court judges that choose to go with these cases to Barnahus. And in the end, you know, today everyone does. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So the longer they were traveling distance from Reykjavik, the more interested they were in a way. In a way, bizarrely.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

That’s a paradoxical fact.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s really interesting.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And it moves like this for maybe a decade or so. And that’s another story because then the Council of Europe started to submit their guidelines on child-friendly justice and then they Lanzarote Convention. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

This is really interesting to hear and thank you for taking me down the history lane. If we didn’t think about it, now we leave Iceland behind for now. Because if I’m not wrong, this idea hadn’t been established as far as I know in any other country. So it was quite revolutionary.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Absolutely. Well, those who came next to it was the USA with the children’s advocacy centers. They did have, in fact, forensic interviews, had the medical evaluation and they had the therapy under one roof. But Icelandic Barnahus is the first one that incorporated the judicial part of it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And as a government service.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

As a government service, an integral part of the welfare system. That was for sure the first, and still it is like that, you know. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Bragi, this is the reason why I’m so honored to talk to you today because I am also like yourself, fortunate enough to travel a lot in my work around in the world and in Europe. This is now an established model very much around Europe. So how did it spread?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, that’s something with this very, very fascinating story in a sense, you know. I was quite convinced after Barnahus had been in operation for two years here in Iceland. How effective this was and how good this was for child victims. We did a comparative research here on how children experienced on the one hand going to the courthouse to give their statement and the other giving the statement in Barnahus. And there was a huge difference in terms of the child’s experience in going through this. So I had lot of data that I could share with others. And I gave the first presentation on Barnabas abroad in the Nordic Barnavarns Congress, the Nordic Child Protection Conference that was in Finland in Helsinki in 2000. And I could sense, you know, when I was presenting, the interest in that lecture hall. And soon I got messages from others wanting to know more about this. And then in 2002, I was contacted by Save the Children. And they told me they had been doing a research in Europe, comparative analysis of nine European countries on how they dealt with child sexual abuse cases. And they were just publishing a report called Child Abuse and Adopt Justice. And in that report, they had chosen Iceland as the best practice in Europe. And I was invited to come to Copenhagen to do a presentation on a conference where they were going to precept the findings of this research. And that, I think, was a turning point. I went to Copenhagen and I did two presentations And then the ball started to roll. 

The save the children’s organization, in Denmark, in Sweden and Norway, they all started to campaign for it. And we started to get requests from both professionals and from politicians, particularly local politicians and also members of parliaments from the other Nordic countries, if they could visit Barnahus. And as there is a lot of Nordic collaboration on the political level, oftentimes they were coming here for meetings and they would, come to Barnahus as well. I kept on receiving at the time many invitation to give a presentation in Scandinavia. So I could feel that there was this great interest. But still, it took some time, a couple of years. The Nordic country also had a collaboration within the Baltic Sea Council, the Baltic Sea States. There was a collaboration called Children at Risk that was set up in 2002. I was elected the chair of that collaboration. And the Baltic collaboration started also to promote this in the Nordic countries and in the Baltic Sea states as well. So at that time there was a lot of talk, a lot of conferences, a lot of discussions, but it was not really until in 2004 I was giving a lecture in Solna in the Police Högskolan in Stockholm. 

And in the break, I was, came these two big gentlemen to me who were the bodyguards of the Queen. And they said to me, the Queen wants to talk to you in the garden.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The Queen of Sweden.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The Queen of Sweden. And it turned out she was the Creator of the conference. And in the garden, she told me that she would be coming to Iceland the following year for an official visit and she asked if she could visit the Barnhus. I said, of course, you’re certainly welcome. And that happened. She came a year later and I can always recall that visit. It was amazing. She was supposed to be there for half an hour. She was there for more than one hour. She was so fascinated by this. And I was told that when she came back to the hotel, she called the director of the World Childhood Foundation, and asked, why don’t we have Barnahus. And a year following this, I received an invitation to deliver a speech in the inauguration of first Barnahus in Sweden. This was in Linköping in 2005. By that time, there was so much interest, both political interest and professional interest in Sweden that within very few years, you would have Barnahus in about 30 cities in Sweden. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

There’s a reason that we Norwegians call the Swedes the Germans of the North.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

If they decide to do something, they do it quite efficiently.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Sometimes. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Interesting. And at least from the Norwegian perspective, when Sweden has it, Norway wants it too.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, Norway came very soon. They asked to come for a study visit here in Iceland. And they came here in 2005. And 2007, only two years later, they start to roll this out in Norway. Now it’s in 11 or 12 Barnahus in Norway. Denmark came a little later started in 2013 and they did that very grandiose. They did that, the first of the Nordic countries to pass legislation to facilitate and to ensure that the Danish Barnahus would be a part of the official structure by mandating the local child protection, the police and the medical sector to refer cases to Barnahus and by then the ball started to roll. Soon Baltic Sea state, Lithuania was the first one, then Estonia and Latvia, down to Hungary and all the way down south to Cyprus, UK, Ireland. So it’s really still spreading. You could say that during the years from 2005 to 2015, it was basically the Nordic countries from 2015 and onwards, it’s been really the rest of Europe. And now we have, well, there was a report given out last year with the Council of Europe. 

It says 28 states in Europe had then started operating Barnahus. Of course, was different sort of co-operates. In some instances, it was Barnahus by default, like in the Nordic countries, or only in pockets, like in Hungary or Cyprus. And there were the 10 states in the pipeline to set up. I have been very much part of this progress I’ve enjoyed that. What has particularly played a very important role in this is the Council of Europe.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Really?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It started off by, I was encased in the work of Council of Europe from 2005. In fact, in a different topic, it was in the rights of children living in residential care and on these guidelines, they incorporated the Barnahus principles limiting the number of interviews that children need to be subjected to to ensure that only trained interviewers were used, you forensic protocols, a child-friendly environment, all that. And explicit recommendations set upon us. And this was the guideline on child-friendly justice. And the following year, we started to draft the Lanzarote Convention. 

The Lancerote Convention was a breakthrough because it’s a binding convention to all member states of the Council of Europe. It has a very comprehensive content with regard to how states should fulfil their obligation for investigating child sexual abuse, and so it’s really, you know, intersectoral. It emphasizes collaboration and coordination and all the rest of it, which is basically the ideology of Barnahus. This was in 2012. I was elected chair of the Lanzarote Committee in 2016. In that capacity, I travelled all around Europe advocating and promoting Barnahus as well as the Lanzarote Convention. And so that was a huge effort. Now today, all states in Council of Europe have ratified the Lanzarote Convention. So they have now taken on these obligations. So that’s not really surprising that they are all implementing Barnahus, because Barnahus really is the only arrangement that can ensure that you meet the requirement of the Lanzarote Convention. And on top of this…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s a solution in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

It’s a solution, yes. And on top of this, the European Union, like they often nowadays do, they take the Council of Europe documents or guidelines or human rights instruments and they translated into directives. And 2012, they submitted the Directive on the Rights of Victims of Crime. And the same year, the Directive on Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation. So it became, in a way, a law of the member states. 

Now, this all had its say, its great impact on this. But what I felt was particularly so wonderful was that the European Court of Human Rights, they came in with a new jurisprudence in these cases, in child sexual abuse cases, where they emphasized that the Council of Europe instruments, should be applied when states are dealing with these cases. The principles of these instruments should be adhered to in respect for the child’s dignity and psychological integrity and to avoid re-victimization of the child was an absolute requirement that the states needed to fulfill. And that had a great impact because the court has so much influence over the national jurisprudence. The committee has consistently recommended states to set up Barnahus if Barnahus is not existent or if Barnahus is existent, then the committee has recommended it to be strengthened to make sure that all children have access to Barnahus and that the Barnahus is strengthened by passing law to support Barnahus. 

So the Committee on the Rights of the Child has also impacted this very much so and it goes beyond Europe because of all nations in the world come to Geneva. So the basic ideology behind Barnahus this multi-agency child-friendly approach, is now the mainstream jurisprudence of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. So this has had enormous impact. So that’s why I believe we are seeing this growth, proliferation of Barnahus all around. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I would like to ask you about, because there’s one specific thing that I think you are bringing, if we can bring the concept of Barnahus Bragi into in a general investigative setting. You said something that when you were doing this in Iceland in the first years, you did a survey on satisfaction. And I think that is a very interesting concept. Could you reflect a little bit about that dimension?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. We did submit this survey to the parents and the kids. So it was quite comprehensive. Quite number of questions on all the different steps of the process. the difference that was scored, it varied a great deal. In some of the elements, perhaps there were not much difference, but others there was huge difference. And what really mattered so much was the child friendliness of the environment. The parents and the children, there was not a huge difference in the way which people interacted with them. They were all kind and friendly and so on. But somehow the child environment, child friendliness of the Barnahus made the whole difference. There were problems in the court, like for example, there were examples where children met their offender in the lift in the elevator going up, know, or they met the accused person in the waiting room. Also, they met people that were not particularly friendly in the corridors that were being taken to one of the courtrooms or something.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like scary situations.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So it was absolutely clear that the courthouse was intimidating for some children, and in fact, many children, I should say. It was intimidating for the children. While the Barnahus was always, there were always positive associations in terms of their feelings and experiences, the way they came. It was really something which was a discovery. And when you come to think of it, you know, it has such a great impact also on the capacity of the child to disclose the abuse. The capability of the child to share the narrative, to disclose, is very much dependent on the level of anxiety. The more anxious the child is, the less likely it is that the child can give you the full narrative of his or her experience. And conversely, the more relaxed the child is, the more likely it is that you will receive the full and rich detailed narrative from the child. And this is something which very soon came out that played a major role in the Barnahus success.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But don’t you think that would apply also to grown-ups?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

I think so, yes. And therefore I have always believed this should not be exclusive for children. This should be also applied for all interviews and interrogations in the justice system, for example.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think you definitely have paved the way, at least pointed in a direction which I think should be… To the extent I know, there are very few satisfaction surveys when it comes to how people in general are interviewed and going through the process of a criminal justice process. So I think that in itself, that is a very inspirational idea that I definitely hope will spread beyond the child victims.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, I think in fact, although it’s not my area, police interrogations, but as I understand it, there has been this huge development into in this area and the Mendez principles is more or less based on the same principles of respecting the person.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I still think we have a long way to go before we have integrated some of pioneering work on how we dealt with our children until we are able to see the same structures and cultures when it comes to how we deal with our interviewees and potential victims, witnesses and also suspects, I guess, in not only these kind of cases, but in all kind of cases, guess, the state or the authority or the different authorities as you have underlined here can sometimes be quite intimidating in general.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

But there was one element you mentioned, the cultural element in it, which I think is so important in this, because in the proliferation of Barnahus, when Barnahus has spread all over Europe, that is absolutely wonderful. And that is that you can see that there is not just one Barnahus, there are multiple Barnahus. I sometimes say that Barnahus is not a recipe for the cookshop of the future. It is rather, you know, you have in Barnahus the ingredients to make Barnahus, but you have to make it in line with when the your culture and your legal framework, your professional traditions and so on. So that’s why Barnahus well really should be called Barnahus concept rather than Barnahus model because it’s not a strict fixed idea. It’s more like a guideline to make a child-friendly, evidence-based structure to address these issues. So that’s why we see all these different types of Barnahus and different ways in which Barnahus have been implemented. There are differences in terms of who is operating it, how it’s structured and organized and so on. There are ways in which the justice system comes into it. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think we will wrap up this conversation by saying that also the, what you said, the general change in from interrogation where it’s more coercive and goal-directed exercise towards what the Mendes Principles are around, which is more process-oriented and value-oriented that requires a shift in mindset. And I think I want to thank you for enlightening me around this tremendous change of mindset that you helped firstly Iceland, but later as more than half of the countries in Europe and it’s still spreading. So by that, will say thanks a lot for a really interesting conversation.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Blessings all mine, I enjoyed it tremendously. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’ve learned a lot and I’m really impressed by the work you’ve done.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Thank you. Thank you so much.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thank you. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Eric Shepherd, welcome to this episode on the podcast Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Today hosted by Ivar Fahsing from Dublin. We’re here today, Eric, because of the launch of the first Irish Mendez Center for Investigative Interviewing. It’s an historical event that w e have centers now working in the country, working across Europe to actually improve the quality of interviewing across Europe and indeed across the world. I have to say for me, that really made this an historical day was the fact that 10 minutes late, Dr. Eric Shepherd actually comes in to the lecture hall and that that’s happening here in Dublin for me actually made the day. And to the listeners, I just have to make clear why. For those of you who know my background, I started in policing in the late 80s. In 1993, I read an article called Ethical Interviewing. I think it was in a magazine called The Police Review. It was written by you. At first, it provoked me a lot because it kind of insinuated that police interviewing was not ethical. There was something missing. And you used words, if I’m not wrong on, there is a cuff culture in the interviewing room. All of a sudden I understand this is a person who knows what he’s talking about. And I had to face myself in the mirror. Ivar, is there a cuff culture in your interviewing room? And there definitely was. So first of all, I want to thank you for writing that piece because it definitely changed my own way of thinking of how I was doing my work, how I was relating to the people I was trying to work with, but also how I related to my colleagues within the police about how we thought about our own practice. So that was absolutely paradigm shift for me. But later also, when we introduced investigative interviewing to the Norwegian police, five, six years later, we didn’t want to go into just a training week. We also wanted to prepare them mentally and awareness, build up an awareness. But at that time, well, I should probably know police forces are not that affluent. So we didn’t have the money to kind of translate all the literature out there. And there wasn’t a reading culture in the police at that time. So we could only translate one piece and that is the only paper that was translated and handed out to police in Norway. I’m just saying this as an introduction that to show how much I appreciate you as a guest today and how much it means and meant to me and how much you are meant to my fellow police officers, at least in Norway. So that means that for me, this is a very, very special moment.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’m actually meeting one of my few academic heroes. So I also know that you also have a professional background, not just a theoretical background for what you’re doing and what you’re writing and what you’re saying. And that leads me to the first question. And could you tell me, and our listeners a little bit, why did you engage yourself? Why did you write that piece? Why did you engage yourself in police interviews and how they were done? 

Eric Shepherd: 

Where does one start? I suppose I came to working with the police service very much by accident. If I look back on my life, most of the things that have happened in my life have happened by accident. And my initial journey with asking questions, but being really interested in people’s answers was in the early 60s, which was in English history, The End of Empire. And I worked in an interrogation center in southern Arabia. And the interesting thing about that was before then I’d never thought seriously about a question or answers. Really, not at all. But in ensuing 10 or so years, by all sorts of turn, I became involved in the process of interrogation and teaching people to resist interrogation, really in a military setting. But of course, what happened was that we have our own kind of history in UK, and of course, people will come to places like interrogation centers in order to learn how to ask questions themselves so what it found my way through was eventually in the mid 70s, I had occasion to be given the opportunity to return to UK and to actually study psychology but also followed clinical training and qualified as a psychotherapist and did a PhD in the nature of people processing people’s answers when they ask questions, particularly doctors. And then towards the end of 70s, I decided that probably I should leave and try my hand at no longer being in what would be an environment of working for Her Majesty and so on. So anyway, I left and by sheer chance, I found a job with the Metropolitan Police. Metropolitan Police had had a very tortured kind of problem with regard to civil unrest in UK and particularly in the black community in South London. And there had been riots and there were riots elsewhere. And they were really quite keen to actually find another way of how officers would relate to people face to face on the streets, but also when they question them. So my job was to work in a team called Human Awareness Training. And that was when I started to try and develop some kind of way of explaining to police officers what made people tick when you were asking them questions, when you were relating to them. One of the things which really struck me when I looked at the way police officers see their job, and quite understandably, they see it as a process. And so very much it’s about almost a sequence of activities in order that if they take the activity, it’s right, they can move to the next. But of course, conversation doesn’t work like that. And one of the things which was really strange was, and again, you’ve mentioned it when you were introducing here, saying looking back at things called the cuff culture, cuff being the word for a confession, was the fact that, police officers, understandably, are very pragmatic. They’re very, they’re down to earth. Getting a job done can very easily become a matter of expediency. And if you do it quickly, all the better, and so on. So they’re kind of what you might call highly practical problem solvers. But of course, the problem about being a highly practical problem solver is that if you’re dealing with human beings, you’re dealing with a whole can of what’s happening on the inside of the other person. And that leads a lot of thought. Now, quite difficult to get a police officer to say, what’s happening on the inside? 

So what I did was I just drew two lines literally going east-west and one up-down and on one end on the kind of the western end of the line going across the page I put self and on the other end of the line east I put other and then I put on the up-down line I put totally in control and top and totally under control. And so what that did is it created four quadrants. And the important issue is, that very often what we find is that when people are doing their job and when they’re conversing, they’re really self-interested. They’re towards the self-end of the line, not towards the other end of the line. And what they want to do is keep control. Now that really therefore means they’re trapped in a segment which is self and totally in control, which almost destined them to actually want to dominate the situation, dominate the person. And what I found really strange, and I’ve never said this before, but in that paper you mentioned, what I found was that police officers ask questions as an anxiety reduction program. They ask questions to keep in control. They don’t really process the answer that much before they’re thinking about the next question. So what you find is when you look at it, a lot of historical police interviewing is just getting the person to confirm what’s in the police officer’s head. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

How was your article received?  

Eric Shepherd: 

Contentiously, the history to it really was that I worked with the Met through the early 80s until 1983, trying very hard to basically say that in order to be able to, for me, in investigative interviewing, which I coined in as a phrase in 1983, really was for me in 1980 when I was scratching around trying to describe how to manage conversation, because that’s fundamentally it. All police officers, all professionals, in the end, they have to manage a conversation with another individual. And the thing about conversation is a lot of people rather view it as a game of tennis where you’ve got a net, there you are, Ivar over there. So you ask me a question, over comes the ball, and I bat it back. Now that’s a crazy model, because there’s more to conversation than batting a ball back and forth. The other diagram I used to draw for the Metropolitan Police Officers was that lovely sign in infinity, so it’s a continuous loop. And what really happens is, rather like you and I now, there you are looking at me, your head’s moving, and let’s just it again. And the important issue for me is, what conversation is, is actually a continuous mutual activity that’s going on all the time. It’s not just me is the two of us. And what I have to do in order to understand where we’re going to get to where I’d like us to be in terms of covering issues is I’ve got to actually know that I flow into you and you flow into me. It’s very complicated. But it’s also simple. 

What has always struck me was that people use words like first impressions. The issue about conversation is that first impressions do count. The first thing you have to do is understand conversation and get your head around conversation. So one of things I’ve noticed is that people who are poor conversationalists are inevitably poor questioners, because they’re not that interested in what the other person, so a true conversationalist isn’t the person who does all the talk, a true conversation is get the other person to tell them things. And then of course what that does is it creates a different kind of relationship. So I thought of that, but if you get police officers, trainees to think about how conversation works and get them to actually polish their ability to get interest from the other person talking, then you could get them to this whole issue of what would be purposive conversation, which is investigative interview. Because an interview is only a conversation to a purpose. And so the important thing is, what you mustn’t do is be so besotted with the purpose and so besotted with the kind of procedures you’ve got to go through to get to that purpose that you forget to actually do the fundamentals of conversation. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You make me nervous now.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Why’s that?  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’m afraid now that my initial idea of the purpose of this conversation might ruin the conversation, but I trust it won’t. I would actually dare to repeat the question.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Yes, so I’ll continue.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

What did it, how was it received? Because as I said in my introduction, Eric, for me, the first time I read it, it was quite provoking.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Yes. Well, it went down like a lead balloon, I suppose, really. The real issue was that was probably the right idea at the wrong time. And one has to be entirely fair because to a certain extent, if you cast your mind back now 40 years, the golden opportunity I had was I moved from working with the Metropolitan to police to working with one of Britain’s smallest police forces, which is the City of London Police, which is right in the heart of London. And that was again another accident. The head of training, John, gave me a call and said, would I like to come round and have a chat about training the officers, because he had this idea about perhaps they can improve how they related to the public. And so on the training floors, literally on the sixth floor of Bishop’s Gate Police Station, opposite Liverpool Street Station, we took trainees through what was another way of how to relate to the public and how to ask questions. And I came up with a model which I tried to say to people, it’s a jigsaw, it’s not a linear thing. And I called it GEMC which was greeting, explanation, mutual activity, which is actually again a bit like the infinity sign and then close. And what I really tried to get across was that the greeting was literally from the very first time that encounter happened. So that in fact, it wasn’t greeted when you went into the interview room. It was, and this was a model that was be applicable from the very moment you collect the person themselves, if you hadn’t seen them before, or if you met them when they were being booked into custody and so on. And of course, coming back to this real issue that the critical period in which really matters first impressions is that four minutes. The first four minutes of every encounter is when we make our decisions about, we trust this person? Are they interested in me? And that’s the person looking towards the police officer. So the crunch to me, suppose really is that gave me the opportunity to say, right, that greeting was embedded there. But the important issue wrapped in that greeting is you send messages about how you feel about the other person. And fundamental to me, and again, it makes sense, is this notion of respect. So at the core of all human existence is which would matter to you, it would matter to me, to our children, their friends, whoever we’ve met today, is that fundamentally we know when someone doesn’t respect us. But we certainly know when someone does respect us as a human being. And that doesn’t mean they have to fall over and actually give us what we want or whatever. But respect is always, always detectable. And what really then for me, I started to chip together and say, okay, well, what are the kind of things that go with respect? And the first thing that really without that respect that this is a fellow human being, then you get nowhere. The important issue is if you go to look at traditional models of interrogation, people attacking their physical integrity, exploiting vulnerabilities, whether they be psychological, intellectual, developmental or whatever, you soon know whether a person asking questions has any respect for the other person. It’s pretty obvious. It shows. Now, if you’re an onlooker and see that, what must it be like to be on the receiving end? So for me, fundamentally respect. And of course, what I tried to do with my police colleagues was to say, actually respect in a policing context is you’ve learned to, it’s all about respect for the law.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Yep.  

Eric Shepherd: 

And you’re there to uphold the law. But actually, as Emmanuel Kant said, you know, the cornerstone of law is respect for the person. And because why would you have law and so on if it wasn’t for people and the importance of do you regulate a society. If you say you respect the law, you definitely have to respect the person. So to respect the person, you also have to say, well, what about respect for information? So running through the whole thing of respect for people, respect for information and respect for law is the notion of integrity. Because let’s use, sadly, the American system. The American system, they’re still allowed to lie to a suspect. It’s still permissible. They’re still allowed to misrepresent evidence in order to progress towards their aim to elicit a confession from someone whom they believe or know to be guilty. But that’s always confused me because you know, can say, know, fruit of a poison tree. But the thing for me, I suppose, really is, you know, it then has to say, fundamentally, whenever a police officer or anyone asking questions, what society is doing is trusting them to have a particular moral position. 

And that moral position must be necessarily founded on ethics. And there are really two ways of looking at life in terms of moral position. We all have a moral compass. We displayed it in the way we behave, whether we’re a business person or otherwise. The way we do business demonstrates our moral compass, a way a clinician makes a decision about something, an operation displays their moral position. So moral position really only can be principled, i.e. it’s founded upon the nature of obligation to the other individual as a fellow human being. And the Greeks had a word for that, as they always do, is called deontic logic. It’s about the logic of obligation.  

Or you can have the alternative stance, which is what I mentioned before, is the one of expediency. Now, pragmatists, people who live, quote, reality, who do live the life of the streets, of working with crime, and so on, as they learn their trade, they are pragmatists. So a common denominator amongst police officers throughout the world is pragmatism. 

That this is the way they see the reality of the world. And of course, if you’re living in an environment in which the whole of the organization, managerially, organizationally, is founded on pragmatism of getting the job done, then what that will do is always favor expediency as a solution because it gets the job done and the quicker you do it, the better and the less resource you use, the better. So you can understand why if you come along with a position which is respect for the person, respect for the law, respect for information, it’s not very popular. 

So what actually happened was we trained successive cohorts of officers going through the City of London police. And then by sheer good fortune, the person I was working for in the Met was appointed Assistant Chief Constable in Merseyside Police, and she asked me to go and train there. They allowed me to develop conversation management, and we introduced that in 1985. It was the first force to train conversation management as opposed to interrogation techniques. 

We used to have people visiting from other forces. We would train them in a national course, how to train conversation management approaches to investigative interviewing. It wasn’t necessarily the issue about trying to ensure that it was about finding out fact rather than a confession. 

Then in 90, at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters Training Center, they had a conference about police interrogation and I think I might have been the third speaker and it was attended by the home office people and the press and others. And what actually happened was someone had gone on in front of me and advertised, the technique that they were using in a large police force in UK that was really founded on the READ technique in America. And the READ technique, as you know, is confession focused. So, the guy in front had, you know, trailer how you could go and send people on courses which were based on the READ technique although they called it a different name. I got up and I’ve written the paper on ethical interviewing. And so I remember finishing the whole thing, paper, I said, guys, I’ve always loved Greeks had a word for it, rather like Deontic Logic. And the Greeks have a word called Kyros. Kyros is a lovely word in Greek because it can mean autumn, but it means “the time,” “the right time” to do something. You have Kronos, which is chronological time, time past, time future, time now. And you have Kyros which is the right time and the right time to say to someone, I love you. The right time to say to someone, I understand. The right time to say, shall we think about it? The right time and I said, guys, it’s Kyros. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Fascinating. I now see. I obviously learn a lot. Because in my head, know, investigative Interviewing starts somewhere even after that article. But you take me back now to the foundations of some of the elements here. And gladly so is also some of the core things that we try to convey in Norway. Why we had to start with ethical re-grounding and moral re-grounding. that fundamental respect for the human being you’re meeting in this conversation. And if you don’t respect that, if you don’t uphold that integrity, it can never be a true conversation. 

Eric Shepherd: 

Absolutely.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So I’m really glad to find out where does that actually come from. I found a real source, I think. Thank you. What’s your idea about, is this a cultural thing? To what degree does this differ? These fundamental things that you’ve talked about so far in the conversation, are they different if you go to Korea, the US, Africa? 

Eric Shepherd: 

That’s a question that needs a lot of thought. My view is that clearly there will be cultural differences. Yes, the countries I’ve been to, that’s very apparent. But I suppose that the issue for me is it may be you’re reflecting on what I’ve said so far, Ivar, is that I try to find commonalities in people rather than the differences. And what seems to me to be is that fundamentally, whether it be Japan, whether it be Thailand, whether it be Southern Arabia, whether it be Germany, whether it be Norway, whatever the case may be. What’s really struck me, and I gained work in America as well, the issue for me is that I’ve always been completely taken by the fact that when I talk about issues to do with human beings’ respect and so on, actually that’s the lingua franca. People understand it. 

But what really strikes me is that there may be different ways of managing this interactive process, but fundamentally I have never found anything other than the commonality of a human being knowing when they’re being treated in a way where they are respected for what they are. And it’s an easy interesting thing. You don’t have to like a person to respect them. And the issue for me is that what respect does is it, you evidence it as much as anything by a whole array of other behaviors that point to it. If you can reflect in the way you literally converse and you interact with this person and you respond to what they say and what they often may not say but be voicing non-verbally as it were in the way they look at you and they may they respond so that desolation desperation fear failure to comprehend all these kinds of issue really again, produce apathy. You soon know when a person is totally without any feeling towards you, your position, what’s happened, the circumstances. Down the other end, the extreme end, is sympathy, but in the middle of that line is empathy. So what empathy is about is getting around to the other person’s side of the circle and looking back. So it’s kind of an issue here that that’s a fundamental key because then at least you can understand what’s going on potentially inside this person’s head, inside their heart. it’s almost like a creative kind of process, isn’t it really? You won’t know, you can only just try and say, what must it be like? Now, where the principle thing comes in is when you use that to their disadvantage. So I think that actually, once you know how a person’s from there, that’s where your moral compass comes in. You don’t exploit their position looking back. There was a lot about how the police interacted with people who were intellectually disadvantaged. Most police officers know when someone’s not very bright. It’s called understanding. I used to live in a village. The guy used to cut the grass. Everyone knew he wasn’t very bright. And in fact, police officers are very pragmatic people. I’ve found them incredibly good at reading people who are not very bright. Empathy is therefore very important. 

I think you’ve got to also be supportive to a person. And if you show even the most minimal support to someone, you know, it plays you back in spades as it were. It gives you the kind of issues of them. And of course, you can give us support. Yes. But also you’ve got to be positive. You’ve got to actually, you’ve got a job to do. You’ve got to journey to travel, but you can also therefore, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Is that lovely saying? I think the other thing is you have to be open with a person. Now, sometimes you can’t disclose everything and there things that to you, it makes no sense. But we do know that in fact, a degree of openness is essential. Because that openness is as much to do with notion of explanation and understanding why, why now, why here, these kind of issues. And I think the other thing is that people know very, much about respect is that other behavior, people soon know when you’re being judgmental. So I think being non-judgmental is actually, you can demonstrate being even-handed. 

The other thing is, I think, which goes with it, is a thing called straightforward talk. You say things that actually a person will understand. Therefore, empathy says, this person, they’re intellectually disadvantaged. They’re developmentally disadvantaged. Therefore, you need to talk in the way that they will understand the world in their way. And then I suppose the last thing is, and it goes back again to where we’re at now. Why do we relate to each other? Fundamentally, there are only two forms of relationship in life that emerge when you meet a person. You either talk across the person or that’s an across relationship or it’s up-down, you know? And if you are occupying a position like a police officer, it’s very easy to slip into the up position, which automatically creates a person in a down position. So up-down relationships are to be found in teachers, at the tort, doctors in the treated, parents, sometimes the children, these kinds of issues. So up-down relationships are very symptomatic of organizations, which are actually, in the case of the police service, behind the whole process of investigation of which investigative interviewing is only one part. So what really strikes me is positional ways of looking at conversation are fatal, absolutely fatal, because what you have is this issue to me is that if you talk across to a person, they know you’re talking across to them. What I’ve done here, Ivar, is to say, at the centre is respect, but you evidence respect by empathy, by supportive, by being positive, by being open, by being non-judgmental, of straightforwardly talking to someone and talk to them as an equal. And I found that way back in the early 60s when questioning terrorists. That I think questioning terrorists is always going to be stressful. Quite a challenge and I didn’t know then that what I was evidencing something which I later wrote out as an acronym response you know respect, empathy, support of this positive and of course that makes sense as well because in that first four minutes that’s what you’re evidencing your response. That’s it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

That’s it. I can feel it, that there is a certain energy that going, is more intense between us when you talk about obvious cases of injustice. How does that motivate you, Eric? And how does that relate to our conversation on interviewing and conversation management? 

Eric Shepherd: 

For a greater part of the early period of working with the police service and looking at what were, issues to do that you could say were misconduct, mistreatment, all these other kinds of issues. What really struck me was it was all too easy blame the person who was actually given the task of carrying out something which was almost pre-programmed. You’ve very beautifully described it way back at the beginning of the cuff culture. Now what really strikes me is that what’s most apparent is that our awareness that the confession became institutionalized. It was basically in the 19th century with the formation of police forces. And the very first police force was obviously formed in UK with Maine and the Metropolitan Police. But you could see that, in fact, before then, that systems of justice have worked by people securing confessions. By the time you got to the late 1900s, what you had was in effect this notion that we needed detectives. So the very first detective force was found, found in only half a dozen detectives within the Metropolitan Police approved by the Home Office. And the interesting thing about it is again, it was all testimony evidence. And what would they, they were great pragmatists. And what you can see is that what they would do is instantly read the situation. They’d arrive at a case theory and then they’d, where is the likely suspect? The suspect came into the frame and then the whole object, the exercise was to secure from this person a confession. So what really struck me when I first started in 1980 with the Metropolitan Police was how much Metropolitan police as exemplars of the UK police service, but other police services, is they were trapped in the whole confession business. So how did you get a confession? How did you get it quickly? And of course, What you would do, is you wouldn’t arrest the suspect, you would invite them to the police station, you would bring them to the police station as they were not under arrest. They had no legal protections. So they would be held there, not under arrest, held incommunicado. They would not tell the people if they were around when they were arrested, say in their home or wherever, a place of work, where they were taken. So they didn’t know where they were. So the common denominator was that people will be held incuminecado psychologically. And of course then what would happen then is they will be left to sweat it out. They could be left there for days. so the important issue is by the time that we do know human beings, most human beings can’t cope with isolation. And so once they are removing the isolation, there is this huge internal pressure to say something rather than nothing, anything to anyone. So the crunch to me then is that what you would then do is engage in an almost programmatic way of inducing a person to confess. And the interesting thing about it for me is that again, you can see it in repeated across the world in different cultures. What would happen is once you got the person to the point of agreeing with what was put to them as what had happened, so the whole object of the exercise was to coerce them, capitulate them. And there was a couple of, three rulings in UK. In effect, what you’re really doing is coercing a person. And when you coerce a person, what you’re doing, rather like the Reed method in America, what you’re really doing is inducing them to stop saying things they would like to say, like, I’m innocent, I don’t know anything, and to induce them to say things they wouldn’t say, which is, I did it, all right. And once you look at the dynamics of the whole thing, the important issue is that at that stage when the person says, okay, I did it, what would then happen is in the UK context is the officers would have a, what would be a statement form at the top, they would write the caption about kind of giving you their free will and things like that at the bottom as well. And then what they would do is give the form to the individual and they would write out. But because there was no recording, no one ever knew that in fact what would happen is that the person would write down what was really they were being directed to write down. So what looked like a confession very often contained the words and so on. And if you look at it, the proof of it is I bet you as a Norwegian police officer when you look back at the old confessions, they were always chronological. Now, human beings do not tell narratives chronologically. The other thing they would do is they would contain vocabulary, terms of phrase and items that would only be what the police officer would want in there. Things that they didn’t want in there would be left out. So, the important issue is they were entirely self-serving with the police officer documents. And of course, it was incredibly difficult to prove that that was, in fact, one of my longest miscarriage of justice cases was a guy who served 27 years in prison. And it took me 13 years or so working on that case to actually get to the point where we could prove that they weren’t his words. But the important issue for me, is that the journey traveled is that now we know with the world of scientific advance, with the world of technology, CCTV, all these other kinds of issues. Although testimonial evidence matters, it probably most matters from witnesses. 

And I found myself saying in the end, if you don’t get the witness interviewing right, you’ll never get the suspect interviewing right. Because if you look at it, what has been the poor relation of interviewing, investigative interviewing, has been witness interviewing. We put all this effort into suspect interviewing. We might have specialist witness interviewing. We might have actually special case interviewing and things alike, as it were. But actually, what happens is that testimonial evidence, which still matters, is generated by women and men who actually say, tell me what happened. The vast majority are not electronically recorded. The vast majority are written down by a police officer, actually mentally editing what’s being said to them. And what we do know psychologically is that if I’m a police officer and I’ve interviewed person A, person B, person C, when I get to person D, I’ve already got a mindset which influences how I’m going to shape what this person says. So what you find is, is that the quality of witness interviewing across the world is desperately poor. And that is because what they are doing is relying upon human ability to hold in memory, also with their disposition also with confirmatory bias, also with their own kind of case theory that what they think happened and so on. So a witness statement is always a highly edited, kind of subjective reflection of what the person actually said. Now, if you then go on to interview a suspect on the basis of X number of witness interviews and you don’t have any DNA, you don’t have any video, you don’t have this, you don’t have that, then you can see why I say if you don’t get the interviewing of witnesses right, how are you ever going to get the interviewing of suspects right? And my last thing I suppose really here is that I think it’s really, really totally appropriate that we should continue researching about how people investigatively interview suspects. However, I would raise one kind of very problematic question. Can you tell me how many research papers you have read which really looks at how people cope with the presence of a legal advisor in an interview and actually if that legal advisor is engaging something called active defense. And that really matters because most of the models you see are devoid of a legal advisor present. But the other thing which really does matter to me is prepared statements. 

But the important issue to me is I’ve always been thrown by the kind of the inattention to a very basic fact. If you have a legal advisor advising a suspect all of your planning in the world won’t overcome the real problem to do with what’s called disclosure, disclosure of evidence. As you introduce the notion of an investigator meeting with a legal advisor before that interview ever starts, that legal advisor will rely upon what is disclosure. They will therefore advise their client. That client’s response is very much based upon that legal advisor’s decision making of the investigative interviewer. Strategic use of evidence, could, and please correct me if I’m wrong on this. You can reduce it to this idea. It’s delaying the disclosure of something until you think it’s the right time to say it. Do remember this Greek word, kyrok, the right time? Well, I have to turn around and say that, yeah, you have to make difficult choices. But if I’m a legal advisor and there is no disclosure or limited disclosure, then my client’s not going to answer your questions, which poses a very real research problem. Or my client is going to generate a written statement, most pre-prepared statements they’re normally short, they’re mostly non-committal and they give minimum account for what’s been said to them. So it’d be a really foolish legal advisor to actually allow their clients to put in a completely nonsensical, manifestly lying account and so on or whatever. But anyway, by the way you look at it, if you’re an investigative interviewer, that’s the next level of difficulty we’ve got to sort out. How to manage decisions about disclosure and working with legal advisors because that is an interesting problem, needs researching.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Absolutely. Where I can say, generates a lot of issues, what you say, but of course you have to put all this into context.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Absolutely.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s like, do take me back to our first national new training programs in Norway in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where we came from a culture where you were actually trying to reduce the impact of that legal advisor, even get him or her out of the room. that was the first thing that we, you know, I said we needed an ethical reorientation, much inspired by your work. I said, what does that mean to your relationship to that legal advisor? How can you activate that? That can give you balance in that interview. And obviously here we shouldn’t go too far into national differences when it comes to procedural law. But of course in a country like Norway, it’s not this legal advisor will have all the documents when they come to the station that here you are. And of course there can be things that here you cannot share with your client at this point. But you should know this is where we’re starting. So that will kind of be the the the fundamental for your advice. That’s number one, which is different in Norway and England, for instance. And the other thing is that in Norway, if you’re a suspect, you’re right to not do you’re right to silence is absolute. You can literally leave the room. You don’t have to sit there. I think it’s absolutely appalling to see in a such a civilized society as I think about England and Wales as that someone is actually obligated to sit there and say no comment. No comment. If I don’t want to interact with you I don’t want to interact with you. It’s a fundamental human right I think. So that’s also different in the way the whole context of interview and I think that does something. You know what you used in the word early on, integrity. So just that legal thing that you can’t leave the room. 

It’s also a fundamental breach of human integrity I think also a breach at least violating some fundamental ideas about the burden of proof and the right to freedom. 

Eric Shepherd: 

I totally agree. I mean, it seems to me to be one has to be sensitive to differences between countries across the world. I don’t blame people for behaving in the way they do given the circumstances they’re in. I spoke about moral compass. So your moral compass is either going to be principled or it’s going to be expedient. Okay. So either or you can’t be expedient and principled. The question to me then is what happens is the evidence of our moral compass is our behavior. And our behavior is evidence of mindset. Mindset is a disposition to think and reason and interpret and to make decisions and to take actions in a particular way. So that’s your mindset. Human beings are really, really vulnerable from infancy onwards to developing a mindset for the circumstances in which they find themselves. So a child vis-a-vis their parents in the family. And so what you find is, that human beings are particularly disposed to developing a fixed mindset. That fixed mindset is one that responds to reward. And human beings respond to reward. And so what we do know is that people who are given the task of investigating or investigative interviewing, really what that displays in their mindset is how they’re prepared to act in ways for which they’re going to be rewarded. Are they going to be given a: You’ve got a cuff. Well done, confession. You got it quickly. And by the way, have a promotion. So the important issue for me really is if you stand back, we as psychologists should see that we can develop and quite rightly, approaches whether you want to look at it linearly, then whether it be your preparation and planning, engage and explain, account, clarify, challenge, close, evaluation and so on. What you can see, all of these kinds of, whether it be GMAC greeting, explanation, mutual activity, close and so on, what we do know is that people will follow what they think that model is, but actually what they’re really implementing is their mindset which is showing their moral position. So you still get people. So what we need to be is very savvy as psychologists is to now take a step back and say, how do you develop the managerial environment in which what we say is, okay, case theory? Well, we really ought to think in terms of alternative case theories, not just one case theory. And let’s think what evidence is said from an intelligence background or whatever. Rather than one explanation, think of an alternative one and another one. What do barrister say when you go to court? Officer, I put it to you there was another explanation. And of course that catches police officers out. I didn’t think about that explanation. So the crunch to me is in order to have the effort to go out and look at different case series, means that you’ve got to look at the evidence. And what we find now is that fine-grained analysis, dominating the detail, understanding it, is a fundamental activity which is outwith the interview situation. So what we should be doing is training people how to handle detail, how to create different case theories, how to actually evaluate evidence, how to, really in the end, stand back from it and say, right, okay. And what seems to me, my final point here is this, you and I have worked in investigative teams and what we do know is that it is still looking towards the chief, the leader, the leader who basically will often, whether they like it or not, whether they really intend to, tend to be the monopoly of what would be the case theory idea. And of course, what really is happening in the world of other organizations is how do you invite the other people to actually contribute to processing? So I think that the next thing coming out from investigative interviewing is looking at how investigative teams work and how actually they work whole process of de-biasing, actually combating every possible form of biasing, of which most are born of a thing called confirmation bias. I think there is a rich area for that area for Mendes, which says, let’s look at how the organization works, how the team works, how that works and the psychology of it. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I will now try to round it off. So thanks a lot and I hope we can invite you back on a later occasion.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Only too pleased. Thank you for being so patient. Thanks a lot. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Welcome to the “Beyond a Reasonable of Doubt”, today hosted by Ivar Fahsing. Our guest is Professor Dave Walsh. Dave, thanks a lot for coming.  

Dave Walsh: 

That’s a pleasure. A really pleasure to be here.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Dave, there’s a lot of things that we could talk about in this podcast, but today, I really invite you to tell our listeners to what actually is Implemendez. 

Dave Walsh: 

That’s a, yeah, I can give you the recent history as to how we got here. And it started, again, relatively recently, it started with a follow-up book idea that Professor Ray Bull, I believe been an earlier guest with you, and I germinated in very early 2022 when we swapped a phone call, changed ideas and said we’d get back to each other. We reach out to people who hitherto, in countries hitherto had not had that much exposure in literature of their country and their country’s practices. That’s building on an earlier book, 2015, which had some countries also which were at that time not well exposed, but also had called the usual suspects of the UK, Western European countries and indeed USA, Australia, so on and so forth. This time we made a purpose decision to just include those countries which had barely been mentioned in the literature, been covered in the literature, been exposed in the literature. And I knew that Ray, through his extensive traveling and me through the contacts over the many years, would have had or could have access to many of these people in these countries. And so it proved to be, much to our surprise, we had 40 odd people come back and say, I would love to write a chapter on our country. And once we got that, secured that kind of commitment, which is really, really, it’s turning to, you know, a recently published book called the “International Handbook of Investigative Interviewing and Interrogation”, covering, let’s say, 40 countries. And we were pleased with it. When we were hatching the idea of coverage, Ray said to me, we really ought to not just get them to talk about their country, but also how they responded to, if at all, to the Mendez principles. And that was a good idea. And I thought, but I don’t just want this book to be an audit, although it’s great as that, but it also then borrowed that idea of Ray’s and built on it where we said, you know, where’s the implementation strategy? And I was told there isn’t particularly one. So consequently, I then reached out to a number of people, yourself included, if you remember, and said, do you want to be part of a project implementation of the Mendes Principles, actually starts to actually create movement, create further movement in some country, but certainly in others, initial movement towards implementation, without being naive that this would be exceed in any country, two, three year project probably wouldn’t see that much movement. But he was just really trying to get the thing moving.  

We got to a point where again reaching out to people and saying, would you want to be part of this project? And we had 36 people come back to us from all over Europe. And we were fortunate enough to secure the funding. That was May 2023. by the end with the whole project starting in October, one of the things we got to do when the money was there, find a name for it. And it was the action chair, the action vice chair, Professor Yvonne Daley, who’s very good at these things, who came up with the idea of the name, which I think everybody’s quite pleased with that name, of Implemendez. 

Though what it is, it has just grown and grown as we speak now in mid-September 2024, we’ve got near 250 members successfully submitted applications to join us. And indeed from 53 countries. it’s a network. Implemendez is a network facilitating collaboration, facilitating partnership both within the academic arena, with academics and practitioners, academics and practitioners and policymakers and so on and so forth, largely across Europe but elsewhere too. Brazil, USA, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan all involved as well. South Africa is another one. Yeah.  

So we were really, we continue to be pleased and impressed by the enthusiasm of the majority of members who want to get involved. And as we’re not paying for them for any of their work, we just pay for their travel and accommodation. You know, it is immense, it’s so wonderful to see this amount of energy, ideas and commitment to the cause of improving investigative interviewing on a global scale and wanting to do something in either their countries or in other countries where we’ve got a foothold. And it is marvelous to see, you know, it’s been going 11 months now since the start of the project, it was October last year and it has, yes, it’s hard work, it’s a lot of it, but it’s great and it’s worthwhile and Implemendez you may only have a short shelf life in terms of funding, but of course we’re building in a strategy and we have built in a strategy which ensures that something will occur afterwards. Something will be, will be on there: partnerships, collaboration teams will form from this and indeed we’ve started to see that already because we asked for projects and 16 were successful, this is supported and that is all about people, most rewarding experience for me was seeing people who hadn’t before October last year met each other, now collaborating and forming project groups and forming project ideas. That’s wonderful. Symbolic of the energy in the whole project, as I say. So it’s really, really good stuff, very rewarding.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

We’re talking about Mendez, just to make it clear to our listeners. Are we going to talk about the effective principles for investigation and information gathering? That was drafted headed by Professor Juan Mendes and published in June 2021. So just to inform our listeners that these, know for short, the Mendez Principles, they are probably the first ever global drafted soft law like document who says something about how it’s interused and getting there both strategically and methodologically and also probably going a bit further than interviewing per se. We also have a how to treat suspects, medical supervision, know, safeguards. That’s what we’re talking about. Implemendez.  

Dave Walsh: 

Implementing the Mendez principle. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thanks a lot. think it’s fascinating to see how much energy there is around these things, which also is interesting in itself. There’s probably, maybe, I don’t know, it’s an indication that there is this mechanism here that is releasing something that had been brewing.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yes, it’s the usual thing. You see it in pockets, but you don’t see the totality of it until you actually give some money and Implemendez seems to have been that home, if you like, for people who’ve wanted to come and improve practice policy, legal systems, better justice outcomes. And it’s important to say, of course, that the number I said to you that’s currently in, it’s made up of multiple disciplines. It’s recognising that this isn’t just for investigators, but it is also for the legal professionals too.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Judges.  

And judges. Key people in this, key agents in this momentum for change and getting these people on board and getting these people to understand the Mandez principles is equally as important as getting officers to interview to understand them as well. So I think that’s really good. And of course, lovely to see lawyers working with psychologists. It’s always rewarding to see that. And that’s what we’re getting interpreters as well. 

Another community, linguists, know, you’ve got lots of criminologists, sociologists, criminal justice, yeah, a real good range of academic and professional skills within the team.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Yeah, I guess for us people like you and me who’s been in the Investigative Interviewing, if you could call research community for quite some years, there’s no secret that there’s probably been a dominance of psychology as a science and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s probably, you were saying, time to see if we can activate and involve all the other professions that can add to this.  

Dave Walsh: 

I absolutely agree. They’ve got a lot to offer. Those kinds of insights, what works and what… What is the right to silence for argument’s sake? And then the human rights issues therein, is really key to the Mendez Principles critical. And psychologists need to understand that. I think, yes, there’s been a dominance of psychologists and you can understand why and to an extent, they’ve done very well. But I think it’s so much better when you get people from different disciplines seeing the world from different perspectives. And that’s good.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And as you said, the vice chair on this project, Professor Daley, she’s indeed a professor in law.  

Dave Walsh: 

She is indeed. And again, you know, she makes a very good point, this Professor Daley, that, you know, 10 years ago in her country, or five years ago in her country, probably as accurately, is that, people didn’t speak to each other from different disciplines. And indeed, you know, she would make the point that the Garda Síochána, the Irish police, were also reluctant to engage with academics. So I think it’s great to see these collaborations of all colors as it were.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

We this, what we call typically silos silos of knowledge. And I think so. 

Dave Walsh: 

But of course, the reality is in the real world, of course, the real world doesn’t act in silos. It’s influenced, it’s associated with the iconocube, but you want a totality of knowledge, a greater coverage of knowledge, of understanding of law. I think maybe we’ve got one of our colleagues who’s done some work, lots of good work on the experience of being detained by the police. Really interesting work. That, you know, we, psychologists, they’ve tended to look what’s happening in the interview room but the experience of arrest and detention might be, we don’t know, might be, you know, an effect on the level of cooperation or resistance in the interview, if it’s been a pretty dreadful experience. 

So I think those kinds of bookending, those kinds of experiences, combining those experiences is important to see if there is something there. We then might also be paying wider attention, broader attention, simply what goes off in the interview. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Absolutely, it’s so interesting.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yeah, yeah, I agree. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

We’ll get back to more what are the activities and where you think these are heading. But first of all, all listeners, who’s Dave Walsh? And how did you get involved in this at all? Where? The background?  

Dave Walsh: 

Yeah, Okay, well, I remember being, acheaving to a grade which was executive officer in the civil service, UK civil service, and being a staff trainer. So I learned how to perform and enjoyed the performance. But that was a short-lived post, it was. And I remember being asked by one of the managers, did you want to work on fraud investigations against the public purse, as it were? 

And yes, I’ll do it for a couple of years, I said, you know, then I’ll look somewhere else. Well, those two years should have finished, you know, you know, and here we are. Now that’s it. But look, nearly 40 years later, my first ever interview with a suspect was on the 20th of January, 1986. The UK’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act had just been put into practice. It had that on the 1st of January that year. There’s the thing, I was really nervous, so was the suspect, was the least criminal of all the suspects I think I’ve ever seen. He was really nervous. He just couldn’t wait to get it over. And thank goodness, this is before recording, we were having to write down our interview, what we came to be known as contemporaneous notes, which my mentor was doing in the background whilst I was talking to this guy. But that’s an interesting point because of course for a good few years, I lost my nerves to a great, you always feel a little bit apprehensive as you’re approach and do. But also, without doubt, I thought it was getting better. And I got the results for the organization. And these still interviews, these interviews were still not being recorded. I was getting results. And you know, I was developing a reputation as a result. There’s a hard worker, there’s always been pattern of my life to work hard to work to never to take have an easy day. But you know, getting these results, and I was getting a great reputation for a person who would get results quite a lot of them quite quick. But I thought I was doing all the white things. Nobody was really model up there managing monitoring my interviews. You know, they were just looking at the bottom line look at the results and brings in. 

Look at the number of cases he solves or the number of admissions he gets, because he was, you know, there were, and I thought I was doing a great job. And so did the organization. So this idea that, you know, I was getting better, I’ve soon learned in the mid 1990s, having gone to a training course, which talked about psychological levers and any doubt in your voice would, the basis of that 1995 course was still that these people were guilty. You mustn’t show doubt in that. One year later, we went on a completely different course. And it changed me. I realized that what I was doing well was not something that people should do in interviews. And so that shook me to the core. 

It did. And I realized I had to change my way. This was good because the results were so easy because you were doing very unsavory things and getting quick results. This was a much more skillful approach that I was learning. And that was a point in my career and almost 10 years in now where I was getting bored. So the idea then of getting to do a more skillful job, I feel more professional. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Going beyond admission.  

Dave Walsh: 

It’s gathering information, gathering much more than that which we’ve looking into other crimes that might have been committed as well. It was great. And that set me off on a, I wanted to learn more and more about this more skillful approach. I took the master’s degree at Portsmouth. And then in due course, I became a manager of investigators at the same time. I’d done some training of investigating and a manager of investigators. And so, during that period of time, I was beginning to really develop an idea about this investigative interview. It really had caught my attention and it some academic success, let’s say the master’s level. Then that dissertation was supervised by another one of your speakers Professor Milne and then I was, I had the great fortune and I still have, got it as one of the great fortunes of being assigned to Professor Bull, Ray Bull as my PhD supervisor. And I had really got to the point where I thought I need to really understand what’s going off in interviews. I really need a real in-depth and this is how I’m going to get keep motivated by understanding at a real quite beyond the superficial level how to interview and what’s the dynamics and what are the keys to success. Because you’re still asking an investigator that they all give you various reasons as to what was the typical I can tell what when people are lying stuff which was evident. People still tried to undertake the old approach of scaring people into confessions psychologically I had to say. This was the, and some others who were good ethical interviews, were the full range. And then two years into the PhD I thought this would curb my academic wandering just to do a PhD. But actually what it did do, right, so is increase it. I really went and I thought I’d, going to change careers into academia. And having then at some later point in 2010, completing successfully defending my thesis, which was about how the interviews with fraud suspects. By this time, I was so far into it, this subject, and I really was enjoying the world of academia as well. 

It really has given me space, which I had never had that kind of space and time for thought, time for reflection, time for intellect. You know, that’s, I was also having challenged it with you by imposter syndrome. I never knew, even though Ray always used say you’re doing okay, this is new stuff. I just thought, you know, I really didn’t think it was that good. I probably still don’t, to be honest, you know, it was new and the new in it was, of course, and this is the manager in me, I suppose, is that, you know, it wasn’t just enough to… Well, I think psychology was just happy just to see what was happening in interviews. I needed to know whether those interviews, that particular model, which I, by this time, a huge proponent of, actually worked in terms of doing what it said it did, which was gather information. And then that probably was the key area, finding what was the outcome of such, you know, it wasn’t just doing the right thing, but he was also achieving the right outcomes. And you know, that’s what I found in my thesis that rapport building, undertaking of the PEACE model, all when done skillfully, not just when done, but when done skillfully, produce better outcomes. And at the same time, when itwas done unskillfully, itactually didn’t achieve the same number of outcomes or the same quality outcomes. So, clearly there’s an association between good things being done as prescribed, recommended by the PEACE model and the outcomes that it set out to achieve, regardless of whether the person confessed. If he did, well, you know, we just kind of say that, that’s even more interesting, you know, but the reality is they got full accounts, full accounts when he was done most skillfully. It really was a revelation. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And the model you’re talking about now is your, we know as the PEACE Pool? Yes, starting with planning. And probably if we have planned this interview better, we would be sitting here with a lift, with an alarm outside the window. That might ruin this recording. So that’s a good example. Poor planning, isn’t it?  

Dave Walsh: 

Well, that was the thing, wasn’t it? Because we really didn’t get that much guidance. I mean, the problem was, of course, the great idea of getting everybody trained. But this is usual. You meet up against the cost of training and the cost of abstracting people from the front line and having to cover for them. And they got a weak training. And for some people, not for all, but for some people, they needed a training course on basic communication skills. A nd then moving to the PEACE model and thinking about planning, what is good planning? What is it involved? And of course, as things went on, I realized we were being encouraged to plan, sit down, do an interview plan. This is all very good stuff. But it occurred to me, of course, that planning was not just something that was done when you knew you got it, got to a point where you needed to interview somebody about suspicions. It’s the very things that you were doing immediately took on the case for investigation. The hypotheses you generated or didn’t, the leads you followed or didn’t, the conclusions you drew from incoming evidence and the further generation of hypotheses as a consequence of what was coming in were all part of the planning and preparation for the interview because if you don’t do that, it’s evident in the interview you’ve not made those kind of ongoing planning and preparation steps. We both share that view thinking. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

What do say? Sometimes I think misused term of open-mindedness. That is an active thing, something that comes from all those things you’re addressing here.  

Dave Walsh: 

I mean, there still is a tendency to form conclusions too quickly and jump to them. I think I’m inclined to think that if you’ve got the investigator who can becomes quite reflective and evaluated of what he or she is doing and is thinking of all what might possibly have occurred in a particular case and from those hypotheses thought to discount those from by inquiries made that they probably didn’t happen and definitely didn’t happen, then you’re starting to hopefully narrow down and hopefully become more suspicious. Rather than, this has happened so many times in my career, I know what’s happened here. I’m not thoroughly doing that. So think this idea of open-mindedness is, I don’t think it’s possible for some people, but it needn’t be important if you’ve really done the very thorough investigation, you’ve not jumped too quick to conclusions. You can really say, look, this probably happened because I’ve discounted all the possibilities. And in a way that you can be proud of. Yeah. Yes, you know, and I wouldn’t how many times that happens. Unfortunately, I don’t think people, you know, that’s one area you would want to say you’re better decision making, judgment, thinking, and you want to see the area of research expanding, that has much more to do in that area, what happens during investigations. 

It’s much more expensive to do, it’s much more labor intensive, but it’s probably what is needed now because we forget, we call it investigative interviewing, we forget the investigative part and concentrate on the interview being the thing which cracks open the case and of course, you know, it’s the investigation which really if done thoroughly, comprehensively, effectively is that which leads to the right conclusion in the case I would say. But we forget investigative part or underplay it and we really do need to, the academic community needs to step up there I think and look at that area.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Well absolutely I think as you know that’s my pitch.  

Dave Walsh: 

And I wasn’t just playing to the audio so I’ve been a firm advocate of this. 

 Ivar Fahsing: 

And in number of ways, that’s probably what we found out after implementing the Investigative Interviewing in Norway. Me and my dear friend, Asbjorn Rachlew were discussing where it’s actually taking us. And we saw after like 10 years into that implementation that this didn’t just change the interviews, it indeed changed the whole way we were thinking. So we can reform much more than the interviewing itself. And as you say, there is still such a great potential and not only as you probably know, in Norway we have an integrated prosecution. So when we did this, also challenged the whole system that was involved in the interviewing or in the investigations and prosecutions as such. 

Dave Walsh: 

There was a recent paper published in meta-analysis of domain 3, wasn’t in the forensic domain by any stretch, but the idea of the meta-analysis was, people averse to the mental effort required? And the conclusion from the study of studies was that people generally veer away from mental effort. But if there’s a culture…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Cognitive measures.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yes, indeed. That applies to him, and I can see it applying to… How do we… In what circumstances, because it doesn’t happen, well, in every time, there are times when that mental effort becomes part of the deal. You know, uses the study, the idea of chess players, know, they, they have to engage in mental effort because they realize it can’t be done without that mental effort. And I think that’s where you, you know, it struck me very, never mentioned the forensic domain. I can think, yeah, but that’s, you know, that’s, that’s an area where we need to show that mental effort, that cognitive demand is part of the deal. It’s not an add-on, it’s not a luxury, a bonus if it’s used. It has to become part of the interviewer skills, applying the mental effort. So headaches are guaranteed, if you like, a necessary part of the job. And those generational hypotheses and checking them out, which we talked about recently, that requires that mental effort. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Absolutely. you’re aware of, the way we do this in Norway is built actually not on a theory from within police investigation, but indeed from a PhD in Sweden, how judges think when they are acquits in the Swedish Supreme Court. And that is exactly where this idea of hypothesis comes from. What can’t be ruled out as a possible explanation for this evidence or this incident. If that hasn’t been actively investigated and reasonably ruled out.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yes, indeed.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Well, the suspect and accused should be acquitted. And so that’s probably what we today would call investigative quality. 

Dave Walsh: 

Yes, absolutely.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

That has to be reflected not only in the investigation, in the interview, but in all those areas that we build evidence from.  

Dave Walsh: 

And that’s professional investigators, that’s what a professional investigator should do.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Probably good detectives and investigators have done that. Sure. For a few times, but maybe not being consciously aware of what am I actually doing when I’m good, and when am I not so good. 

Dave Walsh:  

What do I do? Yeah, know, the importance of it. And building a court, you know, if you, this is the way forward, I would say for investigators, is to capture that and celebrate it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Yeah. Now, it’s interesting that you say that, as such a recognized specialist within the area, because actually myself, when I’m doing trainings abroad now, I don’t call it investigative interviewing anymore. I call it investigations and interviewing just to make it even more clear that this is a kind of a multifaceted process and not just interviewing people.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yeah, I can see why. I thought you might say, where you just call it investigation because interviewing is then one part of a whole series of skills that you undertake during doing a well executed criminal investigation in that context. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s a way playing with words because investigative interviewing indeed encouraged that kind of active open-mindedness, I think. But you were kind of telling me that that encourage, that entails much more than the interview itself. That’s such an important point, think. But Dave, if I could get back to your own research because what you’re saying is that you actually wanted to see does it really work?  

Dave Walsh: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And what did you actually find?  

Dave Walsh: 

I found there was an association because this is applied, this is completely applied, done by people who’ve been trained in the PEACE model and if I’m correct in thinking because I was at the time I started this study, was part of the training section. I was the regional trainer. So I had access to training records and I could see how, when they were trained. And so I knew that, you know, that whether they knew the trained or whether they are trained and had time to embed that training into leads me to another point that we just thought, but on paper to embed that new, newly learned skills into practice and familiar on paper, know, at the time to do that. So, you know, it was interesting to see that those who had received the training were, some of those were better than the counterparts who had yet to be trained. But moreover, when those skillful interviewers, and they were skillful interviewers, there were times when you were despaired of the interviewer, but there were also times when they clearly were skillful in talking to and conversing with, you know, they were conversing with people who they reasonably suspected of have it or had a case to answer if they hadn’t committed the crime, they’d got explanations to give, some of which of course were probably viable ones. And there was that link, there was that association, the correlation between good interviewing skills and good interview outcomes, the right ones, and gathering a full account so that you’d be probably pretty confident that whether the case was to go to court or whether it was actually resolved in another manner, that was the right outcome. It was. And the possibility of the person when they did confessing out of fear, many of the suspects were clearly naive of the criminal justice system. There were very few, the training clearly paid off in avoiding those bad things, bad practices and malpractices. They’re also very good at, when it was working well, they got information from good open questions. You could see them wanting more training in the way that they planned and drew up a strategy. It’s interesting when we retrain, and we did from time to time retrain investigators, that they had forgotten about the planning element where that part of the planning element, which concern how, in what way we’re going to introduce evidence, what way we’re going to introduce topics. was pretty much, I’m not going say it was chaos, but there clearly hadn’t been much thought about in what way we were going to do this. That certainly, for me, I don’t think you can master that art in just one week. I think that’s when you probably need to go back and have a refresher training which builds on those kind of initial skills, but also extends those skills to talk about those very complex tactics and indeed interviewer responsibilities. So I think, that’s, you know, that’s what I, you know, what I wanted to see further training on, on, these really more challenging areas of right topics, right questioning strategy, right, evidence disclosure strategy, building rapport, and maintaining rapport. I this is, I forgot half the moment, the most cited piece of work, is that I found that there was too much talk about building rapport. And for me, what I established is that rapport was at its best when it was not only, A, it could be lost. Even if it had been built in the first place, as the interview progressed, it came to last. B, when it wasn’t lost, it was maintained. That too, illustrated the, not only the importance of rapport, but the importance of the PEACE model, because again, its outcomes, the amount of information gathered, increased along with rapport, not only the main building, its maintenance, but also the skillful use of building and maintaining rapport. 

Well, you’ve got to touch on some pretty difficult subjects for people, which might have pretty life-changing consequences. So, I then became a massive advocate of the importance of rapport, say, that study.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

When you say rapport, for us, it’s obvious what you mean. Could you jolt in? What is it?  

Dave Walsh: 

I love when an psychologist really beat themselves up because they’ve got all these different explanations and then they’ve got language. I think our good colleague, Miet Vanderhallen for me, encapsulates this idea of a working alliance, of a working relationship, of a warmth, of the right way of using humor when necessary, not overusing it or ill use of it, but just a kind of wittiness which might just ease things. And indeed, it’s quite typical of way when humans are involved in a really productive conversation, they do use, even in the most difficult areas, use humor. So it’s really about and the onus on the interviewer to work at the level, capabilities of the interviewee to adjust, but get on that kind of wavelength, get on that kind of harmony. You know, I think, and it’s doable, even with the most difficult of suspects.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And probably also including dealing with challenging behaviour.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think ORBIT is a classic example of showing that certain points in the career, investigators need to go back to the training room and take on, because ORBIT is, it’s quite complex. It’s also absolutely necessary, by the way. The model is something that I most agree with or more agree with. But you know, one thing that I found in the PEACE model, and I’ve asked various people why this was, was in a week they also had to teach them something else. And interviewers, by chance or action learners, but they are not necessarily by design reflective learners. And yet, of course, you know, the growth certainly was evident in my story, but I’ve seen it in others, is that the growth, the understanding of the need to accurately reflect and evaluate and appraise one’s own performance and indeed reflect and appraise appear or indeed as a manager, investigators performance fairly, consistently, consistent against standards and agreement of standards. Evaluation, know, the second day of the PEACE, well, it’s not only about case evaluation or ongoing evaluation as the case, as the interview proceeds, but it’s about personal growth. And the, you from conversation, you know, I’ve had to say, well, it just became too difficult within a week. And yet it is the, you know, we know. From adult learning, regardless of the scenario you’re in, forensic or otherwise, adult learning, regardless of the quality of the training, we know from the understanding adult learning that if it’s not reinforced by self-evaluation, peer evaluation, supervisory evaluation, and good, timely feedback, we know that skills deteriorate.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like any skill.  

Dave Walsh: 

Like any skill. You would want to see that embedded into professional practice. In England and Wales and in other countries too. What do we get? We have uncontaminated evidence of what happened in the interviewer recorded. And I say to my investigators, when was the time you looked and listened at your own performance? And of course then it’s about how do we measure it? How do we know we’ve done what? You know, when we could improve. Those things need to be, you know, certainly looked at. And there are some models there, you know, which aren’t, which you can’t avoid. We know that people when they self-evaluate usually tend to, for some of that, you know, maintaining personal self-esteem in a particular area, where it’s important, investigators want to be good interviewers. But, you know, there are some places where you can’t hide and some tools where you would be deliberately, know, well, at what point did you summarize? Did you summarize at all? You ask them that question, they go, yeah, yeah, we do, we do. And, you know, we know they don’t, you know, it’s not just because I happen to be, have a sample of non-summarizers. It’s, you know, I’ve seen it time as an investigating manager, as an investigations trainer, and as a academic. The absence of summary, appropriate the summaries by the way, the absence of rapport, the lack of forethought about evidence disclosure and questioning strategies are all really laid bare. And there are tools to help people become aware of areas where they need to improve. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a football coach actually analysing the match. same thing.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yeah, absolutely. And because I got the result there, what could I have done better? And it’d be better. And really that’s the hallmark. You want to be called investigation professionals is I tend to find that people want to be called that. Then one of the hallmarks of professionalism is that being under, undertaking of these various forms of evaluation. That’s one of them, you know, but it’s a key one. How do know if I’m doing well? How do I know if I’m being a good professional? You know, put yourself to that test and it’s hard because some things you know, you know, the first step backwards is very backwards, but you know, that’s the way we move forward.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You touched upon it earlier in this conversation that laziness and it reminds me of good footballers. I’ve least heard that people like David Beckham, like Cristiano Ronaldo, their co-players tend to find them already on the training field when they were coming, they were already there. They were already the best players, but they were the first there and they were the last to leave. So to get that kind of culture if you want to stand out and I think it’s really encouraging to hear that at least you have done this because there’s not too much research on what I have to say the very rewarding fact that training pays off.  

Dave Walsh: 

Absolutely. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

It shouldn’t come as a shock, but it’s really interesting to hear that that is some of the very interesting things that you found in your research.  

Dave Walsh: 

Richard Leo, famous American academic, he did a study once called Inside the Interrogation Room. And what I did call it the Interrogation Room, I said to him, I’m doing a study in school outside, which is just as important. They said, what way? I told them about planning and they told them about evaluation. They said, again, you look at areas for which research is barely touched. And those are two areas. What is good planning? What does it involve? And talk about that. Again, it also involves those particular skills of evaluation. 

You know, learning to be a good evaluator. I learned it the hard way, because I wasn’t a natural reflector. I was somebody who got the job done. It’s only when you realize that you need to improve some, again, it’s hard, but it is worthwhile. And I would say, if I can be seen as a successful, having a successful career, the point when I embarked on what might be reasonably called success was the time when I stopped being the all action hero and being the complete learner, which included of course, not overthinking, but certainly reflecting and evaluating and action planning for the next interview. And it becomes, you know, once you master the art, because some people are more natural than us, I wasn’t as I said. But once you master the art, it becomes part of you. There will be times when I’ll look back on this interview, every time I do a presentation to a greater or lesser degree, I’m thinking about what worked, what didn’t work, what I should have done, what I should have included and probably pushed over too quick and all those things. It’s not beating yourself up because you also look at the things that went pretty well because you want to keep them in, you know, in your set of skills or the next task, the time you do that task. But yeah, you know, I would say that that of all the things I’ve done learning to reflect, it opened, well, it opened my mind, but it certainly opened the doors as well. And I love it. And I think I really want people to become not scared to reflect and not avoiding reflection. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Well, absolutely, I completely agree. But on the other hand, it takes time and it also takes effort. I was going to ask you a question about what does Professor Walsh see when he’s looking into his crystal ball. But I’m probably going to reframe that because you made me think, and this is the interesting thing about good conversations, that you’re bringing up the complexity is not just one thing. It’s a lot of different things has to be handled at the same time. As you know, I have a military background and before I started the police and there we had and they still have a tradition of simulation. I was wondering, is it about time that we also spend time and resources to try to develop a full simulation suite? Or like you used to say, where you can train all these skills at the same time? 

Dave Walsh:  

You see, I really enjoyed the presentation I heard given by Jody Coss, this is really embryonic stuff, this area. Has it got legs? I would like to think so. One of the reasons why I quite like the idea is the concept of being able to just, you know, not necessarily organize huge training sessions, but having something that they can, you know, half an hour and have a fresh training with an avatar there. You know, I think that this really should be explored to see how far we can go building resistance models, be built, you know, all the type of uncooperation, different forms and for different reasons, lack of cooperation and fear, you know, and all those. 

I think if the technology can get those various, so simulation is only in the fact that it’s in the training room, it’s with an avatar rather than a real person, but the reality of the situation, other than those things, is what you would get outside. I think that’s, and the idea of very quickly having a person to, without any go on full training. I think that’s got a regular training on this. That’s an interesting model to pursue that. And then training is an ongoing thing. You’ll have scenarios. You know, you could do better in that area, but let’s bring that scenario. Let’s create a scenario where that person has to be trained, which can go into that training on that particular area and improve the skills. Yeah, you know, and then again, you know, not only does thinking become part of everyday investigations, but also the development, the growth becomes part of the culture as well. Ongoing, ongoing, ongoing rather than something you have to go through before you can let on out on the street as it were. Actually just always looking to it to to be trained I should say. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

One of the things I was going to ask you is that, would you think that at some point in time, we would be having some kind of standardized accreditation system for interviewing? Does that make sense?  

Dave Walsh: 

Well, I know what you’re saying. On paper, it sounds quite attractive, quite appealing. At the same time, think one of the biggest, I’ve been fortunate enough to not only work with these people from various countries but I’m also have had the good fortune to visit some of these countries over the last two or three years. And there has to be an acknowledgement that there are some culturally important matters in that country as to how things came to be and will, you know, will over-arch any training, any, sorry, any interview model. And you know, for me, as I’ve said many times, one of the areas where science needs to grow, I mean, we would talk about psychology being almost a Western conceived subject, is that does the psychology or do these interviewing techniques cut across cultures easily? 

You know, the point should really but you know, this may be where the science needs to improve is, is the what do we do need to do to adapt the principles without distorting them? So, you know, absolutely crucial in order to fit particular country without going actually is this country which needs to change a little. So, yeah, you know, but you know, that might be the thing it needs to do, you know, people say to me, Canada is still reliant on confessions. Well, perhaps that’s where, you know, maybe we need to explore why. Rather than go, let’s go and adapt the model then where we put confessions for, you know, maybe we need to go. And this is, where it’s important to bring in other stakeholders as well. They actually say, you know, there is a need to kind of almost go back to basics. 

And that makes it a longer term thing because these bills are never quick fixes. Nut it would be, that’s the kind of thing, you’ve got to just say, right, let’s just adapt. I mean, we’ll say confessions are all of a sudden. I’ve been saying it for 10 years, confessions aren’t central. And now I’m saying it is because I’m in Canada or wherever. And I think we’ve got to kind of get a hold of some of the principles, all the principles to keep consistent, but at the same time, recognize that in some circumstances, adaptation, not necessarily modification, adaptation without distortion is required. And again, that’s the exciting thing is finding out what those adaptations are like, is you’re going to a criminal justice system which is not adversarial but inquisitorial, does that require a different approach? On the face of it, I probably don’t think it is, but let’s keep exploring that because it’s an argument that people might use and we need to kind of counter it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But when you’re saying that, are I was thinking of a more basic skill, is compare you to driving a car. It’s quite obvious today that you would require a driving licence. It’s not to make you a Formula One driver. It’s to make you the minimum required.  

Dave Walsh: 

Yes, those nonnegotiable. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Well, as we do have a worse criminal justice system, perhaps it could be easier to start with the universal legislation. You have certain things that’s already there that you cannot just ignore, like the civil political rights. So these kind of minimum things that could at least be maybe a beginning of a global accreditation that probably all of us could agree on.  

Dave Walsh: 

And of course we’ve got the great opportunity, aren’t we? Now we’ve got the Mendez principles. The Mendez principles provides the framework and very much of the kind of standards that you those common standards, universal standards that we should be applying, you they’re there now, you know, so this is a great moment, you know, what have we learned over the last 20 years or more, but not much more, I have to say, is that, you know, we’ve learned that doing things badly, malpractice leads to bad outcomes. We’ve learned that there are certain things that we do, which are ethical, and skillful as an investigator can lead to good outcomes. We’ve learned that, we’ve built the science up. So we’ve got all that, know, no better signal change when they’ve all fallen into this document, the Mendez Principle. What a signal change to say, we are now at a point where we can confidently declare in any language you like what works.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly. I would like to add to that, because we can also probably agree that although the PEACE model and what we call investigative interviewing is a bigger thing that shows the whole area what we think about that can contribute to better interviews, is a spread, but not the way we were hoping for. Especially maybe in the US, it’s not kind of blooming the same way. But is it your impression that the Mendez Principles actually could be bridging some of these different communities and gaps?  

Dave Walsh: 

I think more needs to be done to ensure that there’s a greater recognition. And indeed, really does require policing leadership and state leadership to say, look, this is the document, we’ve got this expertise, we’re in a position where we can confidently say what doesn’t work or what does work. We don’t need to be arguing the case anymore. What we need to be doing is going, right, let’s move it on. We’ve got this wonderful document, let’s implement it. And we still, what we’re still doing is having arguments about what works and what doesn’t work. We should be moving on from that. the evidence is there, what works and what doesn’t work. And we need to move on from that. And we need, I have a great example from the book, from the new book where one country, says we now are introducing interview recording. I have to say, interview recording alone is a great step forward. It’s one of many steps which need to be taken. You’ve got an exception which is being now used, utilized much more than it ever intended to be for avoiding recording of interviews in that country. 

And so this exception is becoming the norm. And the very fact that police leaders and managers at all different levels are clearly not that bothered sending out the wrong message. If interviewers think nobody’s telling me to, well, well. So this is where police leaders need to stand up to, step up to the mark, as it were, and say, look you know, we were told there’s no going back. This new way of recording interviews is the way forward. You do it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

On that note, I want to thank you.  

Dave Walsh: 

It’s been a real pleasure.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I got you warmed up.  

Dave Walsh: 

Talking with passion, about a passionate subject. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Welcome to the “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” podcast, Dr. Patrick Tidmarsh.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thanks, Ivar. It’s great to be here.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s such an honor to have you on, I have to make a confession. You know, I’ve been working with all sorts of serious and relationship-based crimes for more than 30 years. The reason I’m so excited to have you on this podcast today is that during all these 30 years, I guess I had never experienced a concept that has brought in so many new dimensions and tools for practitioners as “The Whole Story” concept.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The first time I learned about it. I kind of felt, wow, this is kind of rocking my whole understanding. And I have to say Patrick, I thought I was a man who knew about how to deal with sexual crime and relationship crimes. But I instantly understood that, Ivar, you are actually doing victim blaming. 

Thank you for coming and I just wanted to ask you if you could take us in to how does, how did this come about? Where did it start?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, I think with all of this, it actually starts with the offenders. And we know we always say in training, offending starts with offenders and a bit of anything will do, but actually policing didn’t really know that, you know, I mean, we will come back to that later. But to your question, if you understand who sex offenders are, because we started, I started working in offender treatment, I worked in offender treatment with adults and adolescents for 20 years. If you’re listening to them day in, day out, you begin to understand who they are, what they do, how they do it, why they do it, and then the impact that then has on the people that they do it to. And moving across to policing, a while back now, it was clear that there were lots of people within policing who knew bits and pieces of what was going to work, but structurally policing didn’t really understand sex offending. For example, working in the police force that I did in Australia, there was a rape squad dealing with stranger rapes. Lots of detectives, but a very small percentage of what’s really happening in sexual crime. Because as you know, most people know each other in some form or another. And there was an organized child sexual abuse squad looking at people who were abusing children together. And as you know, most child molesters is a solitary activity. So the focus, just a basic focus of where the work was, was in the wrong place. And it wasn’t really until 15, 20 years ago that policing began to look at the volume of sexual crime, what was really happening, who was offending, who they were doing it to. And since that time, there’s been a significant shift, I think, around the world and I’m sure we’ll talk about that later. And for me, it came out of the treatment field, really in the middle 80s, beginning in earnest to look at sex offenders and discover who they were. like there’s a famous study in the middle 80s from Gene Abel and his people looking at men who defended against children, hundreds of offenders who were given immunity from prosecution for participating in the study. So how they got that, I don’t know. But what they found from that is just how much offending they were doing and other really important elements like, I think it was 19%, that’s it, one in five who were there for abusing children, they’re on prison and parole for abusing children, admitted to raping adults as well. Well, that was unheard of at the time, because everybody thought they’re specialists. 

They only do this, if they abuse children, it’s this. Well, now what do we know? You know, 30, 40 years later, what we know is they’re generalists, not specialists. They cross over all the time. They’ll cross over age and gender. And we’re finding in Operation Satiria in the UK, 30 % of the rape and serious sexual offence cases come in as domestic abuse related. So there’s that link into family violence, as we call it in Australia. So we’re beginning to see a picture of relationship-based crime as a whole that’s interconnected in so many ways. 

And so back to the beginning of your question, this all started with an understanding of who offenders are. And then when we get to talk about how you investigate them and how you interview them, for us, it’s a combination of knowledge and attitude and skill. And for me, the beginning of that is in knowledge, understand who they are, what they do and how they do it and why they do it. And then what happens is you begin to see the impact they’re having on other people. And what we’re finding everywhere that when you put good training into police forces, victim blaming attitudes dissolve really quite quickly. Assumptions and misconceptions. If you understand grooming, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a minute, if you understand grooming, then most victim reaction is explainable. If you don’t, you’ll go with what’s out there in the community. Why did she wait so long to report? Why would you stay in a relationship with a man like that? Why has she got no injuries if she says she was raped, why does the child keep going around to the guy’s house? All those questions will be there. How do you answer those questions? Understand offenders.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So what you’re saying is that at least for a majority of cases, me experiences victim blaming. That is a result or is an effect of the offender.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yes. And put the other way from policing. So Chief Constable Sarah Crowe, who’s the head of operations to the UK for policing said a couple of years ago she thought policing the UK got so poor that in effect what they were doing was investigating victims. 

And think about that for a minute. Well, how did you get that far? It’s actually a product of what I was talking about before, not understanding who the offenders were, but also where this sits in our adversarial justice system. Because all investigating officers know what’s coming when it meets a defense barrister, what’s coming when it meets the arguments of what evidence is probative and what’s prejudicial, what will and won’t be allowed to be a part of this story when it gets into that frame. 

So, they’ve become adept at trying to work out where the problems are in the story that are going to affect us as investigators, rather than actually listening to what she’s telling you. And it nearly always is she, but not always. Listening to what the complainants are telling you and seeing where your breadth and depth of evidence is. And that’s where the whole story comes from, because the models set up to investigate were for volume crime. 

Rude robberies, murders, and not for a relationship-based crime where essentially, more often than not, you’ve got one witness. Your story is it. Your story is everything when she comes in and tells us that. So we have this riff that we do in training about talking about old school evidence and new school evidence. And that what we were looking for prior to our new methodology is evidence with a capital E. CCTV, independent third party witness, forensic evidence that proves indisputably that a sexual act took place, even though it hardly ever tells you that it was consensual or not. so that’s what they were looking for. And of course, more often than not, wasn’t there, particularly the witness. And that’s when we started saying, actually, you’re misunderstanding the nature of this crime fundamentally, that it’s not about the acts themselves. It’s not about how she behaves afterwards. It’s about what he’s doing beforehand and during and how that relationship for want of a better word, has been manipulated by him. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And that means evidence with a small e.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Evidence with a small e. Thank you. It does. So we’re saying in the story, in the grooming, however long their relationship lasted, whether that was two minutes of a stranger attack, it’s still him trying to make her behave in a certain way, or 30 years of child sexual abuse, moving on into adulthood, you will find in the breadth of that relationship, evidence of what’s taking place between those two people. And we call that evidence with a small e and that’s what we’re now teaching people through Whole Story to look for. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So where I understand this, that doesn’t become evidence until you’re kind of able to put it into the right story. So the whole story comes from that, where information that previously wasn’t understood. 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

It was considered irrelevant, really. actually, I told the story many times before about how to cover it up with that. So I worked with a colleague, Mark Barnett. We both worked in treatment. And Mark and I moved across to policing. And in the first few months, we were there. Our job, he was there to improve their interviewing of children and vulnerable witnesses. And I was there to improve their interviewing of sexual offence suspects. And both of us were there to redesign all the training programs because there’d been a commission and the usual criticisms had come up. And when we looked around, we found all these people who knew what to do. They were great with complainants or they knew how to talk to child molester suspects. And so on, but they weren’t there in the training, they weren’t there in the structure. And we also went to the courts and watched trials. And there was one particular case, it was a stepdad who had been abusing his stepdaughter for, well, since she was 12 or 13, I think. And as we listened to the trial, as I listened to it, I’d worked with lots and lots of men like that in treatment. So I knew exactly what should have been presented to them, what’s likely to have taken place there. 

And not much of it was presented to the jury. And I was really frustrated. And I went back into the office and I said to Mark, I thought that trial was really unfair. That jury didn’t get to hear the whole story. And from that moment, both of us kind of went, ooh, right. Well, how are we going to do that? How are we going to make it so that they do get a real understanding of the breadth and depth of what’s taking place between people? And we’re working on it ever since. How do you help people who almost certainly will have some assumptions and misconceptions that are wrong about sexual offending, who probably don’t have any experience of it, who are going to be persuaded by a very clever person that there’s a doubt here or multiple doubts here. How do you give them sufficient information to make their mind up about what’s taken place? 

Ivar Fahsing:  

You said something to me the other day, Patrick, that first of all, we have to stop damaging people in interviews. What did you mean by that? 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

I think the most important skill in policing is listening. And I don’t think we train people very well to listen, except in certain pockets. And if you don’t do that, what you’re probably doing is talking or acting. And what we were doing is bringing people into our system. And so, you know, there’s that, here’s this person who’s been traumatised, who finally decided to come and tell their story. And we say thank you very much. 

We might build rapport for a little bit, but our expectation is that they can simply tell us the evidence. And I’m not here talking about the misogyny or the not finding the right people, any of the like the big ticket items of what was wrong with police. You’re just talking about the fundamentals of how do you get good at listening to what people have to tell us and preparing them for what a court’s going to need for what evidence is and think in a way, probably because interviewing started more around suspects than it did, at least that concern for what was wrong with interviewing, know, like false confessions and so on. It isn’t until the focus on children in the late 80s, early 90s that we got better interviewing children. And for some reason, most of the improvements there have not until recent times translated across to adults. And we’re finally realising that traumatised people who’ve been abused in relationships mostly by people they know over significant periods of time need a process of rapport building and understanding of what an interview is going to be all about and an ability from us to shut up and listen to their story that has been quite significantly absent in policing until, you know, relatively recent times. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And I guess also what I take of you saying damaging is a misunderstanding then, evidence with small letters.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

It’s a misunderstanding of where the evidence is. But it’s also, you know, the age old thing of you’re interviewing someone and they say blah blah blah. Yeah, we went to the house and then Tommy was there. And the interviewer, rather than shutting up and letting the story come out, will go with, who’s Tommy? And suddenly you’re off in a different part of memory in a different time. it’s sometimes just those fundamental things. Mainly what we’re teaching people in that first bit, once you’ve done your preparation, once you’ve explained to people what detail is and how detailed you need them to be, once you’ve done a practice interview about some sort of neutral topic, you’ve built rapport, you’ve explained to them how you’re going to go through that, most of what we should be doing in the first, well, that’s… phase of free narrative, whether that’s five minutes or 50 minutes, is not talking. Minimal encourages maximum. Then what happened? That’s it. Nothing more than that. And if you get what people typically, what you get in sexual offence cases is people know what it is you want to hear about. So they’ll tell you the circumstances of that. And then you’re going to do to say, that’s great. But remember what we talked about before about take me back, tell me everything. You should be able to expand that free narrative. 

And so for the most part, when you watch, you know this better than anyone, when you watch really good interviewers, they appear to do hardly anything. But doing hardly anything is extremely difficult. And then in relationship-based crime, you have to have an understanding of the evidence that’s going to be required, the breadth and depth of that. And then you have to have an understanding of what the offender did, where that evidence is likely to be. 

And after that, you’re to have to have an understanding of what a defense barrister will do with that and call what doubts they will attempt to prompt so that you can cover that in the interview. That’s a lot of different levels that you’re having to work on. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, first time we spoke about this, was another thing that your project, when you introduced this and suggested it as a trial project in Melbourne, Australia, you also started to do, you monitoring effects of it and you involve not only detectives and the police, but also prosecutors and you looked at effects of this. 

Hopefully you can expand a bit of what you found, but first of all something that I, if I’m not remembering it wrong, you also started to look about how did the victims experience the meeting? I don’t know if you call it satisfaction rating or whatever it was, but am I remembering correctly?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah, you are, yeah, you absolutely are. So at the time of the Law Reform Commission report, I don’t know whether they were the lowest, but the satisfaction rates are… There’s a victim support agency in Victoria and they take testimony and do surveys with victims of crime. And when the Law Reform Commission produced their report, I think at that time victims of sexual crime were the least satisfied with their experience of policing of any of the groups that they spoke to. Ten years later, after the sexual offence and child abuse investigation team reformed, so we had specialists side-sweet, we trained over the 12 years I was there, we trained six or seven hundred investigators, know, with the throughput of people. So with a dedicated people, attention to the subject matter, and of which whole story was a part, when they ran their survey again, victims of sexual crime were the most satisfied with their experience with police. Most of that was what we try and get our investigators to do. At the end of training, you should come out feeling confident and competent. And the best, I like the best things they say when they finish this: Thank you. I now know what I’m doing, you know, and in a way, I think that’s a tip to policing really up until not that long ago in terms of sexual crime did not know what it was doing. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So after all, where we can talk about what is the important part of policing or investigation to be more correctly. And you talk about justice, sometimes you talk about conviction rates and clearance rates and all that. A good friend of mine, I think policing is about reducing harm.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think the most important phase of any process is before an investigation starts, including someone coming to us and saying, this is what’s happened to me, but I don’t know what I want to do about it. And we spend whatever time we spend with them and they said, thank you very much. That’s enough for me. I don’t want an investigation. Now, how frustrating is that in one sense? I can’t imagine that I’ve been dealt with very well, not that long ago, but now we would see that as an important part of the service the policing provides. Now far more often than not, if you get that right in that first phase, people do want to then turn telling into reporting and reporting into being part of an investigation. And they do want to do a complaint interview. And not only do I think listening is the most important skill in policing, I think complainant interviewing in relationship based crime, particularly sexual offending is the highest level skill set in policing. And I’ll fight anyone that says different. And so that for me will be the focus of whatever time I’m still spending on this. And the other thing I’m obsessed with is grooming. Because along with evidence with a capital E to evidence with a small e move, the other thing that we’re finding investigators really respond to is us breaking down the processes that offenders are operating so that they can see the evidence within each element of that process. And so when Mark and I first started, we realised there were a few things that investigators got wrong in our typical person who came to training. They’d been a police officer for a while. They’d been a uniform member. They just started being a detective. They had some interest in the field. So they were relatively new, most of them. We got some salty old sea dogs as well. mostly they were the newbies. so they would see, they thought grooming was something that only happened to children by and large. Not all of them, but a significant group. you think, well, okay, well, actually, happens to everybody. So we fall through that. And then they tended to focus on the sexual element of the grooming. And I think that that’s partly connected to the child sexual abuse because it’s so obvious when child molesters moved to that sexualised phase of their abuse and the abusive relationship. Anyway, so what we did is then think, well, we need to break this down for you so that you can understand grooming better. And then the more we’ve worked on it, the more we see that that’s actually a clear marker of where you should be inquiring in an interview. 

So we break it down into four phases now. Grooming one, two, three, and maintenance grooming. One is power and control and authority. So he will try in some way to establish that. Now in some cases, that’s just a simple act of, simple act of power and control, it sounds so blase. It’s an act of violence and threat. Way more often than not, it is controlling and coercive, abusive, manipulative, bribery, giving people what they want, gaslighting, you name all the modern words, all that stuff, until, yeah, so someone’s incapacitated with that. And for me, grooming one is, has been the most underdeveloped part of what we’re listening for and what we’re investigating, because that’s where he’s beginning to operate. That’s where he’s establishing a vulnerability. And as we know, offenders target vulnerability or they create vulnerability. 

Then in grooming too, you might get in relatively short time after he’s buying the drinks, he might start making compliments that are clearly of a more or less lovely color on you, you know, or, or why don’t we have, I tell you, let’s move from gin and tonics. Let’s, let’s have a slow, comfortable screw against the wall, you know, some sort of ghastly cocktail sleazy joke as they’ll move into that sexualised phase. And then with children, the other end of the spectrum in a while, you’ll see basic things like the introduction of pornography, questions like have you ever had a girlfriend? Have you ever had sex? So there’ll be some kind of move into him framing it as the relationships moved into this kind of orbit. And then we kind of, we used to say then the offense takes place. Now really we’re saying the offense or offenses in and of themselves can also contain grooming. So if you’re holding someone down at that point, that is a demonstration of power and control and authority. If you’re saying you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You’re attempting to make them frame what’s happened to them in a particular way. So we ask investigators to really pay attention to what’s being said and done in the offense itself, not just the act, but what’s happening in and around that act. And then in the maintenance phase of grooming in child sexual abuse, for example, you might have continued deception of the child’s parents in order to maintain connection. You might have even after there’s no abuse, you’ll have any anymore. You’ll have constant contact, gift giving, reinforcing of the messages of silence that are required and so on and so forth. And I mean, a typical one that we get in rape cases would be texting or social media connection following that where he is either occasionally apologising, but more often than not would say, was so hot last night, I can’t wait to see you again. Which would be completely against her experience of a violent, threatening, intimidating, non-consensual act or acts that took place. So we’re teaching our investigators, first of all, if you didn’t get the interview right and you didn’t listen to the breadth and depth of what she’s telling you, and you didn’t understand assumptions and misconceptions so you didn’t cover off on the maintenance, there’s a way he said afterwards, then you’re going to miss where your evidence is. So understand those phases of what he’s doing and make sure that when you’re listening to her, you’re prompting into those parts of that memory. And if you can’t do that, we’re not going to get enough to help our police prosecutors. I think the last thing on what you said before, I should say is it’s really important that police forces see prosecutors as allies and that wherever possible, the training matches up. 

So with Operation Satire in the UK now, there is a national operating model for all 43 forces in England and Wales. And the Crown Prosecution Service also has a new national operating model. They also incidentally produce very good materials on assumptions and misconceptions and how investigators and prosecutors should be able to handle that. So there’s the beginnings of a much better relationship in the way we train and think about relationship based crime. in Satire’s case, it’s RASSO what they call rather rape and serious sexual offenses. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thank you. It’s definitely making me think about what I haven’t done in all my years as a detective and how much evidence that passed through my ears without even being understood. know, the topic of this season’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the Investigative Interviewing. So how does that relate to this?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, let’s come back from Beyond Reasonable Doubt. If you think about what we’re jury members to do here is to understand the story that took place between two people behind closed doors who’ve known each other probably for a while, at least for a night or a week or more, 20 years, to understand the breadth and depth of what’s taken place to overcome all those social scripts and sexual scripts and assumptions and misconceptions to be able to absorb the trickery of the defense. And there’s a lovely article incidentally. I can’t remember the of the authors now, but you can look it up. They matched. Zydefeld, Zydefeld et al. 2017, 2016, 2017. They looked at 50 matched cases from the 1950s and the 2000s, rape cases. And they asked the question. Is defense doing anything differently in the 2000s than they were doing in the 1950s? And the short answer was no, because their job is to undermine the credibility of the complainant. Usually the only witness, right? But there was some really interesting detail. If I remember it rightly, there were things that you could do in the 50s. You could say, well, ladies and gentlemen, he’s a really lovely fellow and he wouldn’t do a thing like that, you know, and we don’t really think like that anymore. I mean, look at what’s in the papers at the moment. Al-Fayyad. 200 women and counting. Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Harvey Weinstein, and on and on and on. So you can’t run that in the same way anymore. We’re more cynical. They’d run the chaste woman defense that because she has no injuries, she didn’t attempt to defend herself. Therefore, it must have been a consensual act. Well, you can sort of get away with versions of that now, but you couldn’t run it in the way that we’re running in the fifties. 

So what were they doing in the 2000s when they looked at it? They were delayed complaint being suspicious. Mark and I did some, these are very, rubbery maths, right? But we got frustrated with that in a group once we thought, right, well, let’s just do the numbers. So if one in seven women report about one in 10 children report in childhood, those people who report child sexual abuse and adult weight on average 20, 25 years before they report. 

We looked at our figures and about a third of people reported to us within 72 hours, which is the criterion of Vigpol for an immediate report. Put all those numbers together, only about 5 % of people who’ve been sexually abused will report that to the authorities within 72 hours. 95 % of people won’t. So where’s the credibility of delayed complaint in undermining someone’s story? 

So lack of injury, they’ll still run, they’ll run memory issues. And here’s where we come to where interviewing is particularly important because any prior inconsistency created by the way we talk to people, any misunderstanding, or if we, if there are memory issues in the interview that we have not properly explored and explained, they’ll run that. So we know these stories will be pitched in to an adversarial system, a fight essentially why we put traumatised people into that. And that’s a whole other question. Are there better justice systems here? Yes, there are. But for what we’re doing right now, our interviews, their stories go into a hostile environment. We need to be utterly prepared to help them navigate that process. And the key to it is back to that. Do we listen? Do we understand our subject? 

And do we listen enough so that we can put those two together? What he’s likely to have done, the breadth and depth? Are we suspect focused in the way that we listen? And have we got everything that she knows about what’s taking place between her and him that’s potentially relevant evidence? Pretty hard job. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Pretty hard job, but as you said, the good interview looked quite effortless. So what would you say if you could say a few words? How would you think hope it looked? How should you do it?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, funny you say that because Becky Milne, who I think you also interviewed, were working with Stiri on a project looking at first contact, initial account and VRIs and looking at the different trainings and different interviewing. 

Questioning that we’re doing of people across that point. So creating inconsistencies and we’re also then looking at what would be a model to help investigators in relationship based crime get better breadth and depth of evidence. Now, now the UK’s got ABE achieving best evidence. Pretty, pretty good, you know, and in UK been, they’ve been leaders in all sorts of interviews for a long time. So that the structure is, is fine, but it needs some tweaking for relationship based crime back to all the things that we’ve been talking about today. And what we’re working on really is a format where you do the preparation, you explain the detail, you do practice interviews, you’ve built rapport, someone’s ready to move from telling to reporting to interviewing, so they’re mentally prepared for what’s coming. And then we really see it in three phases. Two people, three phases. The two people are, the person in the room is technique, listening and questions. And yes, they’re going to hear the evidence and they’re going to have their views and so on. 

But it’s a lot to remember and a lot to focus on if you have to think about defense and you have to think about breadth and depth and you need to be maintaining rapport and so on. So we feel as the other interviewer, Becky doesn’t like the word second interviewer. I call them the second interviewer. She likes co-interviewers, but co interviewer, but so we bicker about that. But so the other interviewer is there to listen and understand what it is that’s required of the investigation and what has not been sufficiently explored, that’s definitely going to be important. And we, we sort of see it in three phases. The first is free narrative, that idea of getting everything that’s there without treading on, as Becky would say, the freshly fallen snow of memory as best we can, we get what’s there. We break, we discuss, we look at grooming one, two, three, four maintenance, whatever she’s told us. look at where, what are the key marker points that need to be gone back to. So then we come back in phase two is taking you back to the part where and tell me more about. So all the bits that we think are important, however long that takes break. Now of all the things we’ve got, if somebody’s coming to this story, who doesn’t know anything about this, what needs further explanation or put another way, what’s defense going to use against us here? So, there’s a story that I wrote about in the book, of a woman who went for a massage, very, very common case that we get through the door. goes for a massage and in the course of that massage is raped by the masseur and she waits two weeks to report it. Also very common. So it was one of the first jobs I got moving across to policing and in that job, she actually withdrew her complaints, but it got us thinking about what’s, what, what could we do better with all of that? And in the interview, it wasn’t particularly, just to say it wasn’t particularly well handled, but talking to her about it later in that two week wait, well, in an interview, we would know the defense is going to make something of that. They’re going to suggest the weight in that period of time is suspicious in some way. Well, actually what she said about the two weeks is that she couldn’t believe it had happened to her. She felt she was in shock. She phoned her sister immediately. Good statement. The first complaint, her sister says, go to the police and she says, I don’t even know how to explain this. How am I going to tell them? You know, she’s completely jumbled and we know the trauma impacts people on a physiological level for quite some time after the traumatic acts have taken place. So she said in her brain, I’ll just put it behind me within a very short space of time. She can’t eat. She’s not sleeping. She, when her friends are calling, she’s knocking back the call. Even her sister isn’t getting through. She still maintains her job, though, which she loved. She’s going into work and this becomes an increasing issue of isolation, her mental health declining, not eating or sleeping. It isn’t until the last straw is she can’t go to her work. She gets to the car park at work. She she starts shaking. I think she has a panic attack of some kind or other trauma. And and in that moment, I’m going to swear on your podcast right now. She said, you know, I thought, fuck it. I’m going to the police. 

Now, old school, we either didn’t get that information or we thought it was a problem. So we kind of skirted around it. Now we would say, tell us about the two week wait. Now also let’s talk about the culture of policing that like, not that long ago, we’d have gone, bloody hell love. You’ve waited two weeks to report. You’ve really tied our hands behind our back here, you know, or we’d have said, why’d you wait two weeks to report? Now we’re also teaching them. We’ve done the prep. We’ve done the the, you know, the rapport building, we’ve prepped them for what we’re going to say at this point. And we’re going to come back to a question like, okay, so this happened a couple of weeks ago, but something’s brought you in today. Tell me about that. Or we’d say, so this happened a couple of weeks ago, take me through everything that’s happened between then and you coming in here today. We’ll want to explore the breadth and depth of that period of time, because I don’t know about you when, when she explained it like that, I went, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. 

So phase one breadth, phase two depth, phase three, go back and explore everything that you think she still has to say or is potentially going to be used, you know, by defense against us in some way or another and put that in with what is already quite good established practice around the world. That needs to be slightly shifted and upskilled to meet what relationship based crime investigation needs. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You make me think, Patrick, on one of the most misunderstood concepts I think in Investigative Interviewing is the phrase keep an open mind. Because you can’t just keep an open mind. There’s like tabla rasa, there is nothing. If you don’t have the knowledge that you and your whole storybook is providing to relationship detectives, investigators, you don’t know what to look for.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So, and open mind, as one of my men, Kyle Arkes, asks work on how to think like a detective, it requires actively having an open mind. So that requires knowledge about what you should look for. What can you expect? What are you up against here? What could this story be? And if you don’t have these concepts actively in your head, how can you actually look for it? 

And as you say, put the light on it and get the details of it and put it into a context.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So this is also one of the things that this taps into what I think the whole idea of doing any form of investigation is that you actually have this fundament of deep insight in what you’re investigating.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And without that evidence will just fly by and you will not even see it. 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

I totally agree that there’s a caveat there I think which people sometimes think there’s a trickery in all of this. But we’re not changing the fundamentals of investigation. There’s still a fairness to the accused, is still explore every avenue of inquiry whether it leads towards or away from your suspect. None of that shifts. Our view is that whole story should get you the stories that are not quite right as well as the vast majority of stories that are. And whilst we’re on that, let’s talk about false reporting. 

One of the reasons Mark and I got jobs in policing is because of investigators thinking false reporting was 50%. No, and they really need to change that culture. What we know now from decades of research is the false reporting rate in sexual crime is somewhere between 2 and 10%, probably closer to 5 than 10%. And I think for me, even more important than that kind of headline number is that both from our own experience and from the research of those roughly 5 % of people who come in and say something that’s provably false, the majority of them are still trying to tell us something that either has happened to them historically or is happening to them contemporaneously, but for some reason they’re not telling us what’s really happened. An obvious one that we would get quite commonly is they’ll say it’s a stranger when actually it’s a family member because it’s too hard at that point to say. So malicious false reporting in that way is much, much less common than most people in communities think it is and certainly even now as investigators think it is. 

So, but even then, when you know that 95% plus of people are coming in telling the truth, there is supposed to be an investigative process that will find the things that are problematic as well as the ones that are not. And so then I want to come back to your point, because I think the much bigger issue is how many people are not reporting to us because they lack faith in the judicial system. They lack faith in policing’s ability to listen and understand their story. And then we come to the point that is I think fundamental to what you said, we need to prepare our investigators so they know where the evidence is likely to be. And 95 plus times out of 100, they will find it there if they know how to interview properly. And occasionally they’ll find a story that isn’t quite right. So they can then explore that and see, well, is this a genuine false report in some way or another, or is this actually something that you might want to change your mind in? If we’ve got rapport, you’ll tell us what really happened to you. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, this is a podcast episode and there isn’t time to explore the whole story around the whole story. I would like to round off with one last topic and the reason you’re in Oslo this week is to share some of your insight and experiences with us at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, who you know work, we’re trying to introduce more fair trials, more better investigations and you know human rights through interviewing mostly in what we used to call third world countries. They’re not that anymore at all. They are emerging strong economies but some of them are stuck in old cultures and old governance systems. So I know you’ve been teaching this not only in England and Australia. How do you think this theory applies to two countries that are you said, old term, not Western old democracies.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

So let’s talk about offenders first and then talk about policing. And with offenders, they are highly predictable, whether they’re domestic abuse, family violence perpetrators, stalkers, child molesters, the rapists, they are highly predictable and yet also unique. Each of them is going to do what they’re likely to do slightly differently. And policing needs to catch up with the predictability of them and a way of capturing the evidence there that’s unique for each particular one. So we need to know more about who offenders are. And they do, you know, there are differences in different parts of the world. There’s more types of one kind of offending and another, but by and large, they’re everywhere in every community, in every culture. It is the violence against women the most significant issue in policing women and children and men because we haven’t talked lot about men but you know men report even less than women do and there is a significant group of men out there experiencing sexual violence too and we are not good enough at getting them to come to us and say we’ll be able to hear your story. in policing, policing has the same issues all around the world. 

It doesn’t matter what kind of country or culture I’m teaching in, you will find assumptions and misconceptions. You will find, I’m afraid to say, misogyny and patriarchy there that has made this a non-issue up until relatively recently. It was not seen as proper coppering, know, taking doors off and catching thieves, all that was the stuff. This stuff was relegated to, you know, well, when we let women into policing, they can do this sort of thing. 

It’s moving, it’s shifted, but you’ve got those cultures are still there in certain places and across every country and culture that I’ve worked in, there has been a lack of understanding of who offenders are and an inability to investigate them effectively. There have been low reporting rates. And so the reason that we have found a whole story beginning to be more effective is linked to the skill of listening and interviewing. It gives complainants a way of giving a breadth and depth of that evidence. 

And we are finding wherever it’s been put in place, increase in charge rates, decrease in victim blaming attitudes amongst investigators. Interestingly, in some cases, better use of mental health services by investigators, because this stuff’s pretty difficult to deal with on a day to day basis, especially in the hurly burly of policing with too many jobs and not enough money and not the right kind of interview suite and all the other pressures that they have and so on. So I would say across the world, there is a shift towards better policing here, but we have a long way to go. And it doesn’t matter where you are, you see the same types of problems and challenges to get investigation. But also I think both of you and I care really deeply about complainant interviewing and improving investigative interviewing here. We have a long way to go make people in our communities feel that they can come forward and be, listened to, understood and have, if they wish, cases thoroughly investigated. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, there’s another thing that you can’t… Well, hopefully there will be listeners to this podcast who will learn from this really nice conversation about what we actually can do to protect and to reduce harm. In the meanwhile, before the right people actually get to meet you and get your training, at least they can get your book.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Which is now finally available and you can get it on Kindle and you can order it. all I can say is thanks a lot for being our guest today and to the listeners, get the book.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thank you. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Professor Rey Bull, welcome to this podcast called “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” on Investigative Interviewing. 
Ray Bull: 
Thank you. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s an honor to have you on this podcast because I have to say, for me, Ivar Fahsing, as a young police officer and early academic, you were probably the most influential person in helping me and my good friend, Asbjørn Rachlev, in building a national police training program to Investigative Interviewing for Norwegian police around 25 years ago. Yes. So it’s a particular honor to have you here today. And also I have to behave because now I have to show you that I’m a good interviewer.  

Ray Bull: 

Of course, yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So this is the real test. Well, welcome Ray.  

Ray Bull: 

Thank you very much. 

Ivar Fahsing:  

Ray, since you have, you’re probably one of the few persons who have been seeing this development from it actually started. And it started in England and we could say that in the eighties. Yes. And could you please take us along to how did it actually start and why did it actually start?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, what happened was that in my country, in England, as in many countries around the world. Years ago, the people with the very difficult tasks of police interviewing people suspected of crime, many years ago now, they received no training, no help, no guidance from anybody. They just did their best. They did what common sense suggested to them. And in a small number of cases, their common sense, which of course is that a person who is guilty of a crime, the common sense view is that a guilty person would never of their own volition voluntarily tell the police. That’s the common sense view. We’ll come later to say that that is in fact a mistaken view and that’s a common sense view. And so of course, if you have no training in anything, you’re guided by common sense. 

So there were a small number of cases in my country before any interviewing was recorded where people who had been interviewed by the police, whether they were in prison saying they came out of prison or they were not imprisoned, they reported to their friends who reported to the media that in their opinion, they had been treated very harshly by police. In some cases they claimed that they’d been punched or hit. There was never any suggestion of terrible torture like with electricity and horrible stuff like that and other kinds of things. It was more the interviewer and getting frustrated and allegedly headbutting the suspect and things like that. And the chiefs police and the government took notice of that because when you’re lucky enough to live in a democracy such as Norway or England where one of the duties of the media is to report bad practice by any organisation and so the police were getting a bad name because the media were brave enough to report what allegedly happened in these small number of cases and that led the government to make a very groundbreaking decision at the time so we had legislation dated the year 1984, 1984, the interviewing by the police of suspects by law had to be audio tape-recorded. But the police were given two years to purchase the necessary expensive equipment and have proper rooms that were enabled good recording to occur. 

And initially, the police quite rightly were against this because they said to the government, are we the only profession that are legislating that has to tape record what they do? You don’t do this for medical doctors, you don’t do it for lawyers, you don’t do it for… why are we first chosen? But because of the bad publicity that had preceded, the government insisted and to the credit of the police within a small number of years, they came to the opinion later that it was a good idea.  

So what happened is the recording became compulsory in 1986. And one of the benefits of recording is of course that you, the interviewer and or your friend and or somebody else can listen to that recording to give you advice about what you did well, what you didn’t do well, where you could improve. And so what the government did is they commissioned four studies of these newly recorded interviews. Two were done by police officers working for their doctorates and two were done by researchers, not me on behalf of the government. So these four people got access to the recordings and they analysed different recordings but the four studies came to the same conclusion which was that the interviewing was not very good. And then when the chiefs of police said, my, dear: Why are they not very good?  

The obvious answer was people had received no guidance, no training. They’re just using their common sense. And so then the government of Chiefs Police said, we need to do something about this. So they commissioned 12 experienced detectives to form a committee to develop some kind of training. The first time training would ever occur and be formalised on a national basis in England and Wales. Relatively small countries. And whilst that committee of 12 male detectives was thinking of what to advise, they had a year or two to do it in. One of the detectives who had done one of the original studies listening to the recordings with his two supervisors was he was doing a PhD. He had a degree in psychology, his name was Tom Williamson. And so he had the idea that perhaps those 12 defectives who had to come up with some kind of training might benefit from being aware of some psychological principles about how best to communicate with people, et cetera. And so he, Tom Williamson, got together a small number of psychologists on Sundays and we collated anything that was of scientific value from any part of human behavior that might assist in the task of in a non-coercive way assisting a suspect to voluntarily decide to give you relevant information. And we had no idea whether this booklet of psychological stuff that we collectively produced, which was given to the committee of 12 male detectives, we had no idea at all what they would do with it. We suspected they would probably most likely put it in the bin because none of those detectives had a degree, none of those detectives were psychologists as such.  

But to us, complete and wonderful surprise, one day a large parcel arrived at my university office, which was from this committee of 12 detectives. And it was a heavy parcel. When I opened it, the covering letter said, Dear Professor, we have decided to incorporate into all our documents and training quite a lot of that psychological stuff that was passed to us, but because we have been instructed to write everything of a reading age of 16, because young police officers in those days didn’t have many school, if any, qualifications. So we had to write this psychological stuff in very basic language, and we are not sure that we have done justice to these complicated ideas. So could you go through what we have drafted and tell us where we’ve got it wrong? 

Well, I have to admit they got almost everything right. There was almost nothing they had misunderstood. And if I was grading that work, which I often do as a university professor, I would have given it the top mark. It was absolutely impressive how they had understood and brought into what they were proposing a whole load of psychological stuff.  

Ivar Fahsing:  

Fascinating. Well, I take it then that you were in that reference group that they actually got this material from. Could you tell a little bit how did you end up there? What was your background?  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, that’s a very good question. When I graduated with my bachelor’s, I started doing a PhD that had nothing to do with policing. But the person I was in love with, she won the university scholarship to do a PhD in psychology where we had graduated from. I didn’t get it, of course, because she was much better than me. But I got a funded PhD studentship in London, which was a journey of five hours away from the person with whom I was in love. 

And we decided to get married and therefore I even more didn’t want to be so far away from her. So I went to the professor where we had graduated, where she was doing a PhD. And I said, I know you don’t have any money, but my parents have no money, but we will somehow survive on one PhD studentship. So can I do a PhD here with the department I love, with the person I love? And he kindly said, yes, we can ask you to do a little bit of helping out in classes, but it won’t bring you very much money. And so I’m embarrassed to share with the world that in my first PhD year, all my friends would never let me buy a drink because they knew I didn’t have any money. And towards the end of that first year, the senior professor who had allowed me to do the PhD, start the PhD came to me and he said, he had just been awarded a research grant for one year in an area of psychology very different from what I was doing. And he would be very happy if I would agree to work with him because I would be paid. And I said, yes, sir, I’m very happy. And he said, well, don’t you want to know what it’s about? And I said, I don’t care what it’s about. And he said, it’s to do with the police. And I said, yeah, that’s fine. What is it? And he said, it’s to do with when police officers go on patrol before they leave the police station, they’re given information that’s relevant to that day. And in English, that’s called a daily operational briefing. And this project is to help the police make the information more memorable. So it’s a lot of psychological stuff in it. And I said, yeah, I’m interested in memory. That’s very good. So we started that project and I had to write reports every three months. Of course, the professor improved the reports to the Ministry of Policing and the ministry was very pleased. So they invited the professor and therefore me to continue for a second year in that arena. so much of what we did understandably wasn’t for 

for public knowledge, we published a few things and then some of the work I’d done in my first PhD year, because I had a brilliant supervisor, we had published a lot of that. And so the professors in my department said to me, well, Ray, they thought I was good psychologist. You’ve published quite a lot of stuff. You work with the police. It’s time for you to start applying for the lowest level of professorship, the most junior professorship. 

And I wanted to go back to London at that time, so I applied for jobs in London and I went for a job that related to what my PhD would have been about. And unknown to me, at the same time, they were looking for somebody to teach memory, which is what my police work was about, but we hadn’t published much about that. So another joyful part of my life was they offered me the job I did not apply for. They offered me a professorship in memory. So then I started working in memory and what psychologists worked on. I’m now talking about the middle and late seventies. There was a lot of research in psychology on what’s called eyewitness memory. How to help people when they’re shown a series of photographs not to choose the wrong one, but to choose the right one. So I worked quite a lot on that and that got me involved again working with the police. So I had a background in psychology and policing, which was why Tom Williamson, the police officer, who was a psychologist as well, who got the committee together on Sundays, he knew that I knew a little bit about policing and a reasonable amount about psychology. So he thought, I think correctly, that I could help him produce this document that he hoped the people coming up with the training would take notice of, which as I said, they did take notice of. So that’s how I got to that stage. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So they came up, assisted by you and other set-up scientists with the beginning of the PEACE programs. Could you say a little bit about your impression about how this program was received? 

Ray Bull: 

As I said, those 12 male detectives surprisingly had the skill to write about police interviewing and psychology in a way that was readily understandable. So the ability of other police to understand it, it may not agree with it, but to understand it was achieved by those 12 male detectives. A crucial thing had previously happened that I had an involvement in that I haven’t yet mentioned, which was that around 1980, there were some riots in cities in England, particularly in London, in which early career young patrol officers, who mostly looked like me, Caucasian, were stopping people who didn’t look like them, Afro-Caribbean teenagers, in parts of London, as is a part called Brixton. And so in the history of London and England, we talk about the Brixton riots. And there was an official inquiry into that. And the official inquiry concluded that these riots occurred because on the one hand, young male Caucasian police officers could not understand people from an Afro-Caribbean background. And the Afro-Caribbean people understandably also didn’t understand Caucasian beliefs. So this judge wrote this report saying that the training of early career police officers from now on for the first time should include what was called cultural awareness. And because the major riots were in London, the police organisation that piloted this additional kind of police training was the London Metropolitan Police. So they decided to enhance the curriculum that young police officers received by 30%. An extra 10 % was on cultural awareness, 10 % was on communication skills, and 10 % was what was called self-awareness. The better you understand yourself, the better you understand other people. And so the Metropolitan Police in about 1981, they began that training and then I was asked to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of that training initially for one year. And I had a really good researcher working with me called Peter Holcastle. And every year that one year project was extended. So we did that project for six years. at the end of the, therefore towards the end of the 1980s, I think partly in the light of the work we had done with the Met, the national government decided that all police officers had to have that training. And so when those detectives came up with the interviewing method, the PEACE method dated 1992, there had been a background initially in early career police officers taught by mid and senior career police officers, because we produced a curriculum. 

So fortunately there was a background awareness within policing, at least in England and Wales, that psychological things could be of benefit to them. So when the peace method was produced, for some officers, it made a lot of sense because that’s what they had learned earlier in their career. You know, that to get the best out of a person, if you’re a patrol officer, you need to treat them with a level of humanity and respect. If you want to move on five arrogant non-cooperative young men, you don’t hit them overhead with your police baton. You talk with them at a respectful level and then explain to them why it’s in the interest of everybody if they stop blocking the street and let people pass. So I think that’s one of the reasons why in my country, we had almost no resistance to this weird and wonderful idea that the detective had called the PEACE method. It was amazing how 

easily accepted the notions were of course some of the things within the method are quite difficult to do because of course you only need training if you don’t already do it. So there was no need to train police officers in how they should breathe because they already knew how to breathe and of course a number of officers have certain skills they bring to policing but things that the detectives learnt in psychology that are subsequently found to be very important in getting a guilty person decide voluntarily to tell you what they’ve done is something called the asking of open questions. In social life, men almost never ask open questions. Women, yes they do. But men, if they’re in a society which is historically of male dominance, they don’t tend to want everybody to give them information. They’ve already made up their mind. That’s the kind of gender bias that used to exist doesn’t exist anymore in my country. And so another thing that has subsequently been found by many people in the world to be important is that when you’re interviewing a person, you have good reason to believe has some relevant knowledge that might be implicate them as a guilty person. They may not be the bank robber, they might just be the driver. You’re trying to find out. 

So what the PEACE method advocates is treating even a person you think has committed a horrendous crime, you put aside your common sense. If I were interviewing a man that I had good reason to believe had sexually abused a lot of children, I want to hit him. I want to be an old style police officer. I want to torture him for the bad things I think he’s done, but I’m not yet sure. That’s why I’m interviewing. If I am a good interviewer, he may well decide to tell me what he’s done. Then I want to hit him even more because he’s now telling me about the first child he’s abused. But my PEACE training says I have to listen. I have to not show any judgment I have about negative things. I have to continue to have rapport with him, which means the ability to continue to converse. And in more recent research, I have to show what in psychology we call cognitive empathy. That means I show him that I understand how difficult it is to talk to me. I know from my planning of my interviewing that he himself when a child was abused and if he starts talking about that I respond to that in a constructive way. We know that 50 % of child abusers themselves were abused and I don’t excuse his behaviour but I resist the intent in my human desire to strangle him by continuing to talk with him and let him talk with me and when it gets a bit difficult, we revert back to what we chatted about at the beginning, which might be soccer or some other thing I know that he and I are interested in. So a lot of the peace method is the opposite of common sense and the opposite of what you would like to do to this terrible person that you’re interviewing. So some aspects of it are really difficult to do, but then never created a backlash against it. 

So as far as I’m aware, obviously I’m biased, but I’ve looked for backlash ever since. I’m not aware. And when we talk with other people, both within England and other countries, such as Norway and other countries that have adopted this same humane method, there seems to be once a police officer understands it, they are not resistant to it. The crucial thing is to get them to understand why you will get more information from somebody if you don’t punch them. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

The training was generally well received.  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, to a surprise and in fact it didn’t take long within the police service for to become a trainer of this interview was seen as a very elite thing to do. It was seen in the same category as other successes in policing and it wasn’t necessarily a route to promotion, but it was a route to being admired by others because now things are recorded when you interview suspects and other people listen to your recording. If you’re really good, they can tell you. And some people can become really, even men become really, really good at it. And so it became esteemed within the police service relatively quickly. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think also, I would like to ask you, you were really touched upon it. what was kind of, if you think, one thing is that they received it, see, and it also gave a certain status to be involved in it. Did it bring about any change?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, surprisingly, surprisingly, it did in two or three ways. So this new method was introduced as we said in the year 1992 and at that time in England and Wales there were 127,000 police officers. So of course they cannot all be trained in the first year or two. So what the chiefs of police decided to do was to have the training given to those who interview suspects in the most difficult circumstances. That’s either very senior crime or the suspect may have learning disability or be very aggressive kind of person. And so the people that would normally do that interviewing, because you need to do interview those people, they were the first to learn about and be trained in the peace method. And then the government asked me to analyse a very large sample of the interviews conducted by these people who were the first to be trained. And maybe they were well chosen to be the first trained, but in their interviews, they demonstrated the majority of the skills quite well. Understandably, they were weak. They were unable, particularly the men, to make most of their questions open. If you’re talking to a suspect with appropriate breaks for two or three hours, to continue to ask mostly open questions rather than suggestive or what’s called leading questions, which you do a lot in ordinary life, is extremely difficult. we were able to identify even in very good interviews, the things that they found difficult. And also in the sample of interviews, there were some skills that were required that almost everybody could do. 

So that helped revise the training because if everybody finds something easy to do, you don’t need to spend a lot of time in training on that because you know it’s quite easy to do. But the things that are important that are more difficult to do, you need to devote more training to that. So that kind of modified the emphasis in the training. And then that was mid 1990s. And then quite a few years passed in England before anybody had the willingness and ability to access these recorded interviews.  

And a very experienced crime investigator who worked in a government agency that investigated crime, a guy called David or Dave Walsh, contacted me one day and said he was finishing his career. He was in his mid-forties had enough years of experience to retire on a government pension but didn’t want to stay at home being bored and he wanted to do a PhD and when I said why do want to do a PhD he said I want to become a professor and myself being a professor I said you must be mad, it’s a terrible job. Behind the scenes students don’t see what an awful job it is behind the scenes. Dave said well okay. 

And of course, Dave, still working in the government crime agency, had access to hundreds and hundreds of interviews. So he was the first person who decided that he would analyse the interviews for two crucial things. On the one hand, how well each of the skills that is taught is performed. On the other hand, how much information the suspects gave that was of an incriminating, what we call investigative relevant information. 

And Dave did a series of studies within his PhD on these real life interviews. And he found that the more the interviews resembled a good quality PEACE interview, the more the suspects gave information, including in a democracy, the small percent of suspects who are genuinely innocent. And it’s very crucial not only to get information from the guilty, but to get information from the innocent that demonstrates that they are indeed innocent. so Dave did a series of studies and then some other people were beginning to adopt peace methods. Some parts of Australia, for example, followed of course some years later. No, before Dave’s PhD, Norway had already adopted the PEACE method. But I think Dave was the first to relate the amount of skill to the amount of information. And a number of other people, if they have access to recorded interviews, have done it in other countries. Some people with myself. So Dave’s interviews, understandably, because of the agency he worked for, were not of murderers and rapists. So I wondered to what extent, Dave was finding and others would apply in the more challenging kind of interviewing with people suspected of sex crimes or murder because of course if they tell the truth they know they’re going to go to jail for a long while. That fits with common sense. Why would a murderer or a child abuser voluntarily tell you knowing full well that in doing so, not only would they go to prison, but if they were a child abuser, their friends and family will probably disown them. And in the UK, if you go to prison for child abuse, the other prisoners try to abuse you. So it’s a very high risk situation. So after three years of trying with a PhD student called Samantha, we were able to access some real life recorded interviews with alleged murders and rapists. 

Basically, Samantha found the same thing, this strange thing which is called rapport, to establish a conversation with the person at the beginning based on their interests, and then to move on skillfully to talking about the alleged crime and to maintain rapport with them, as I’ve said earlier, when they’re telling you bad things is really difficult to do. in these high stakes, situations Samantha found the same thing as Dave that the better the interviewing matched onto the PEACE method, the more information people provided. And there’s been a series of studies and I’ll just finish with a very recent one. So with a PhD of the person of mine now, Dr. Bianca Baker. Bianca was always very interested because she has skills in psychotherapy on the role of demonstrating that you understand another person’s point of view. That’s called cognitive empathy. So what Bianca did was we got access to real life interviews with murder and rapists, a different sample. And she evaluated the interviewing for a number of things, particularly ability of the interviewer to demonstrate an understanding of the situation the interviewers found themselves. So it’s not emotional sympathy. It’s not getting upset or aggressive. 

It’s demonstrating an understanding. And what Bianca found again was in this highly skilled level of PEACE interviewing, which we call level three specialist investing. They are the only ones trained in cognitive empathy because they are the only ones who interview in difficult cases. She again found what Samantha found, what other people found, what they found, what other people in other countries have found. 

Though to untrain people who have the common sense view that to get information from a guilty person, you have to threaten them, you have to coerce them, you have to torture them, that’s the common sense view. To get people to understand the opposite is really, really difficult. But it seems to be effective and there are more and more countries and of course here in Norway for 20 years, you have had the wisdom of training in a way that science tells us is a much better way. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

As far as I know, this has been a game changer in Norway. a bit easier to introduce Norway than elsewhere because we already had a bachelor for the police, so the bridge between science and policing was already there in a way. It wasn’t kind of a new thing to be scientific, but we lacked areas of high relevance. And so I think this came at a very good time, but we needed something that was, you know, it was a lot of the theory that was a bit broader, a lot of technology was, and it wasn’t directly in the streets. But this, I think was, at least here in Norway. Could I ask you, Ray, again, thinking about all the years that you’ve been involved in this and and in so many different countries, cultures. Do you have an idea whether this model or approach in generally works everywhere? 

Ray Bull: 

Yes, I’ve been surprised that I’ve been lucky enough to go to several countries that in my previous earlier life. I never thought I would ever be lucky enough to go to various countries where you know, there has been quite a lot of torture and coercion by people who have not been given the knowledge that was given to people here in Norway and so of course depending on the culture, you present the information in a way that is of cultural relevance. 

So I don’t start off talking about the PEACE method in some cultures. I start talking about other meaningful situations in any culture where getting information from a person, getting them to do what you would wish them to essentially has the same skills as the detectives came up in the peace method. So that may seem a long winded answer. So I tried to make my introduction to it of some meaning to the audience outside of crime investigation and get them to understand why what I’m going to be talking about in the next two days not only applies in the interviewing of suspects or witnesses or victims, because some witnesses and victims don’t want to tell you everything either, how it’s not the only part of life where PEACE-like skills are important, those skills are important in many other aspects of life as well. So depending on the culture, it depends where I start. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I haven’t traveled as extensively as you, but also been fortunate enough to deliver this kind of training in many different cultures in Africa, Asia, South America. It seems, you know, it’s, it’s graspable and it’s natural for any culture, at least that I have seen.  

Ray Bull: 

Yes, as we said, it’s natural and other aspects of crime investigators life, which helps us explain to them that that natural skill is also relevant to interviewing suspects. That’s the challenge you and I have to get over for them to understand that listening, not interrupting, smiling, making sure when you ask a question it relates to what they’ve said, all those things that are important outside policing are also important in policing. 

But not everybody is good at it. That’s the problem.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It takes training and it’s a skill. And speaking about skill and implementation and, you know, we’re now in 2024. 

Ray Bull: 

Yes, it started 40 years ago when the government announced that in two years time the police would have to record. Yeah, it was 40 years ago that what was the most important first step occurred, which happened to be in my country. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

What would you say is the, if you were giving advice to someone, you know, from a country that taken on PEACE, what could they do to attract interest or to kind of start doing it? would you think they should start?  

Ray Bull: 

Well, the way I normally do that is to say. Let’s take the situation of entering a suspect or a crime victim. If you don’t do it well, on the one hand, you don’t gather enough information that would lead to the jailing of a true criminal. And so if you don’t do it well, the true criminal is still out there doing it. 

And in many societies, in one way or another, there are costs to that society and sometimes to the government of the health and wellbeing of victims. So one of the ways I start talking about it, particularly with senior people is I can save your government money. And they look at me very puzzled. These are professor of psychology is here going to talk about interviewing. So why is he starting off talking about saving money, because I know that one of the resistances in many countries to this training is this training cannot come cheaply. You cannot achieve it in a few hours so to have trainers and police not doing their duties, but being trained, cost money, you know, as they’re saying from somebody, best things in life are not cheap. So they worry about the upfront costs. But I point out to them that the better they are at getting information from suspects and witnesses and victims, the more crimes they solve, the more the right criminal is now in prison, the person who suffered the crime feels better because the way they were treated and the person that abused them is now in prison so they feel good about that so they don’t seek so much from the health service. So that’s one way I start off by saying I’m here to save you money. They always listen to that. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Professor Ray Bull thanks a lot.  

Ray Bull: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

We could be going on for days. I think that was a really good ending. Thank you.  

Ray Bull: 

So thank you, Ivar. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Today, we welcome a distinguished Mark Fallon, to our podcast “Beyond A Reasonable Doubt”. Warm welcome to you, Mark.  

Mark Fallon: 

Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be on with you, Ivar.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I don’t know where to start, Mark, with trying to give our listeners a short introduction of your professional background. But at least I can say that for me, you are the symbol of this development within the US. And I know that you have a background in the Investigation Service as a deputy commander there, you were deeply involved in the first modern terror attacks on the US and you also have been responsible for training on a national level for the federal agencies in the US. But maybe you could give our listeners a bit broader picture of what your professional background has been. And how you ended up in investigative interviewing.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the kind welcome. You know, I often describe interrogation, as a complex adaptive environment. It’s a longer continuum. And my career and trajectory has been along this continuum that has continued to thrust me into some very challenging situations where I’ve had to make some decisions and had to rely on expertise and knowledge that I did not necessarily have at the time. And that’s, know, being with NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, you know, that’s one of the hallmarks of that institution is providing support to the US Navy and US Marine Corps. And so when something happens, NCIS is the agency that conducts the criminal investigations, the counterintelligence work, or counterterrorism. And now cyber is certainly a much larger part than when I was on active duty. But they were the ones that were looked to solve issues so that the military can continue to function. And so during my career, that’s what happened. And it happened with the first World Trade Center attack. And I was involved in the case on what’s known as the blind shake, Omar al-Aqda al-Rakman, who’s a spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden. And then when the USS Cole was attacked, I led the USS Cole task force. I was at the time, I was the NCIS chief of counterintelligence for the Europe, Africa and Middle East divisions. 

And so I had that part of the world for NCIS for counterintelligence, the globe is divided into three different sections. Well, I had the sections that certainly were the most dangerous and most threatened with the Middle East and Europe and Africa, that particular area. And the principal job of that was threat warnings. So my division was co-located with the Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, the ATAC which provides the capability to alert Navy Marine Corps forces, the fleet, about pending threats. And this ATAC, it’s now called the MTAC, the Multiple Threat Alert Center, was actually created after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut when the after-action report determined that there was available intelligence that could have made the military personnel on the ground more prepared.  

But there was no ability to get it into the hands of those operators. And so the Navy turned to NCIS and said, establish this capability. And frankly, we failed. The USS Cole was attacked on the 12th of October, 2000. But there was actually intelligence available about potential small boat attacks. And we had that intelligence. And of course, 17 people, sailors died that day. 

 I became what NCIS called the commander of the USS Cole task force working with the FBI. And so it became a large undertaking for NCIS particularly, and really changed the organization. The ATAC turned it to the MTAC, and NCIS created its own counter-terrorism division, Directorate which at one time was under counterintelligence. And so that really thrust me into a major role in a top tier investigation into the Al Qaeda terrorist network, which during the first World Trade Center attack, I didn’t even know what Al Qaeda was. So now I’m thrusted to this. Then of course, when the 9-11 attacks occurred and President George W. Bush made the decision to utilize military commissions rather than the federal district courts to bring terrorists to justice. I was thrust into that and I was detailed from NCIS to the Department of the Army to work directly for the officer secretary of defense to establish a task force that had never been, there’s not been one like it before, to be the investigative arm of this new military commission process. And so in that capacity, had, okay, design a task force, who should be on it? What should your competencies be? How should you be aligned? What should be your command structure? What’s your report writing system? All of these, what building are you gonna be in? Things like that.  

And so when that occurred, I was the chief investigator for Al Qaeda for the United States, for the military commission process. So honestly, I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. You know, looking at the fact that, particularly the department of defense had turned to me to establish this task force and bring those that attacked us on September 11th to justice. That was our objective. The president said that the federal district courts, that system was impracticable to try terrorist. 

And it went to the commanding general of Army CID, the Army Criminal Investigation Division Command, which is the Army element responsible for criminal investigations, which is a different, the services all operate differently. And so the Army does not combine its counterintelligence capabilities with its criminal investigation capabilities. The way FBI does, the way NCIS does or Air Force OSI does, the Army equivalent didn’t. And so Army CID did not have the depth of knowledge or experience working within the intelligence community because that wasn’t within their primary portfolio. And so when I was detailed Army CID, I had to kind of help them understand what it’s like working within the intelligence domain. 

And so when I established my specific investigative units, they each contained criminal investigators, intelligence analysts. Each unit had their own lawyer because of the unique laws that might apply. And each had an operational psychologist or behavioral scientist. And Army had not traditionally had done that. 

NCIS during my career had made very effective use of operational psychologists to support the operators. And so when I got this mission to establish a task force, investigative task force, the first, one of the first things I did was say, I need to draw upon a base of knowledge that I don’t have. And so I established what we call the behavioral science consulting team or the “Biscuit”. So we brought in an expertise that we did not have. And that included bringing in operational psychologists from other entities within the intelligence community, including the CIA, to help us design the methodology that we would use to conduct our interviews and interrogations. Because this is unlike anything we had had before. I mean 3000 people were killed on, you know, in the World Trade Center. I mean, the Pentagon was attacked. I mean, plane was downed in Chancho, Pennsylvania that was destined to hit the Capitol. And so the U.S. was being attacked, both economically. New York City, the economic hub of the United States. Militarily, the Pentagon, and our government itself, the Capitol. And so this was attack on democracy, on our way of life here in the US. And we were filled with rage. And decisions at the time, were based, in my opinion, on fear, fear of the next attack, fear of what happened. 

 Ignorance, really not understanding the nature of this attack, and arrogance, thinking that we can just do this, what we did with the EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) program and reditions, that we would be able to do this, and no one would ever know. 

That just is an unrealistic expectation and this is what many people don’t understand is that the matter in which that we started was everyone had to receive our training program and how to conduct these interviews interrogations before they deployed, before they actually engage in it. And it was all report based. It was all about establishing your report. It was about understanding the Middle Eastern mindset. It was the exact opposite of what the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, EIT was. And while operational psychologists from the intelligence community, including the CIA, were helping me establish rapport-based investigative and interrogation methodologies because we knew them to be the most effective, the CIA outsourced torture to contract psychologists who had no background in al-Qaeda, no interrogation experience, and really took them down a road that created incredible problems for the US. But what was unique about these investigations from a criminal investigator perspective, normally when a crime occurs you have a crime scene and you have suspects. In this case, we had suspects and we didn’t know what crime they may have committed, right? Because we sweeped up all these people and now we had them in custody and now we need to determine what they might have done. Not only for potential prosecution, but for release and, and my task force, more investigators conducting cases that led to the exoneration or release of detainees. 

Then, I worked for the prosecution. Overwhelming majority of them did nothing. Because the people that really were the most culpable were taken to black sites rather than turned over to criminal investigators. 

I know this is a long story to your question, but what that did is that, this is what kind of really was the catalyst for the movement here in the US. And so what happened was there was a recognition within the government much earlier on before the public knew and within those of us working the cases, much earlier on than the rest of the government knew that the manner in which we were conducting interrogations, particularly the EIT program, was counterproductive. It was not only ineffective in getting accurate, reliable information, it was getting unreliable information. It was getting inaccurate information and uninformed and flawed decisions were being made based on that. And so, when in 2006, 2005, 2006, the President Bush wanted to try to solve that problem. We had all these people at Guantanamo that should have not been there in the first place. 

We had tremendous resources focused on trying to get them repatriated, released, transferred, because they didn’t belong at GITMO. And we were assuming liability for them. We were holding people that didn’t belong there and certainly losing credibility in the international community, because it was clear high-ranking Al Qaeda members. 

These were people who were, I call them in my book, bounty babies, right? Who we paid a bounty for people who we suspected may be extremists. And we purchased a lot of people, I called it human trafficking in my book, right? And so we purchased them and we sent in a GITMO and now we had to kind of sort through them there. And so that effort, the Office of Director of National Intelligence commissioned a study, and it was called, Inducing Information. And that study was conducted by Dr. Robert Fine and Brian Voskull, who were both members of the behavioral science consulting team that I established. So these are some of the people that I brought in to help understand the nature of the beast, to help understand how we should conduct interrogations, to help understand the risk of potentially releasing or transferring them, And so, as I said, my experience in NCIS was, I don’t have all this knowledge, I need to draw upon the knowledge of others, so I can make an informed decision for the Navy leadership or in this case, the Department of Defense leadership about a direction to take. That study was the…, and they came to FLETC when I was there, I was the director of the NCS Academy and the assistant director for training to the Federal Office of Training Center. And the study came there and said, we would like to look at the manner in which you train investigators. And we invited them in and they looked and they went to the FBI Academy and they went to local police academy, went to Boston Police Department, and what they discovered in the US here, it had been more than 50 years since the US government had invested any significant resources into why somebody would talk to us. Right now in Europe, be it at PACE and PEACE and things going on in Europe, you guys were much further along in the research basically because of abuses with the IRA and then, and so the overreaction of the state is what caused kind of the shift in mindset in Europe, right? And that’s the same thing in the US. The overreaction of the state caused a study of it, which said, wait a minute.  

And so, what happened then is in 2009 when President Obama was elected to office, one of his first executive orders in his first days of presidency, 13491, said, we won’t torture anymore. However, we need to understand, we need to know the best methods to elicit accurate and reliable information to protect our national security. 

Right. And this is what’s a little different than the PEACE foundation from the foundation here in the US with the HIG, the The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group which was formed as a result of that executive order, is that the focus, the primary foundation in Europe was a human rights focused to get information. 

The foundation within the United States is we need to protect our national security, but we need to do it lawfully. And so just a little bit of shift in the inflection and the focus. And this is why I take exception when I hear people who are afraid to say the word interrogation, which is benign, is the fact that that entire apparatus was for intelligence interviewing. Right. It wasn’t for investigative interviewing. 

And then of course, an interview is an interview is an interview, right? And so there’s really no difference between it. So, it’s about effective interviewing, right? And when you’re conducting, this is what we had to do was you had to elicit information and you needed the most data. 

And then I often equate it to if you work cyber and you work in computers, everything’s a one or a zero, right? You’re getting ones and zeros. And that’s the same thing when in interview, you’re getting ones and zeros. How you apply it, it might be intelligence. It might be evidence. It might just give you a better understanding of something. And so the goal is to conduct an effective interview to elicit data that can be analyzed and then applied. It may be applied to exonerate somebody. It may be applied to make a more informed decision about where to apply resources, things like that. And so this movement in the US was created because of interrogational abuses. The movement in Europe was created because of interrogational abuses. 

And so the goal is to learn from those lessons. And that is what really started what we have here in the US was the high-value detainee interrogation group at the high level. And for me, I was thrust into that because I was asked to be on the HIG research committee and be its first chair and to help with the instruction of the first interrogators to go through the HIG training program. And so for the first time, I started to really get involved in a collaborative effort with researchers rather than just using the product, what I understood about it or what somebody else told me about it, but really working alongside of researchers. 

And I wrote a piece in Applied Cognitive Psychology when they had a special edition on interview interrogation talking about how collaboration between scientists and practitioners will improve the practice and will improve the science. Because it was clear to me that many of the researchers didn’t understand the practice. They really didn’t. And when I see the manner in which some studies are designed, it’s clear to me that they don’t. And it’s clear to me that practitioners don’t understand research. And so the whole goal is to kind of bridge that gap so that these two work to assist each other’s objectives. And so the research will better inform the practice but the practice will better inform the research as well. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Mark, a couple of times you have said: in my book, because the first piece I read from you, to be honest, was a book called “Unjustifiable Means”. Could you tell us a little bit about why did you write that book and what is it about?  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, that’s a great question, Ivar, because I never thought of myself to be a writer. I wasn’t one of the people who always wanted to write a book. 

Frankly, I don’t enjoy writing. I’m an emotional writer. I write when I get pissed off. And so what kind of thrust me into the public domain, as someone who speaks out was really my involvement with the HIG. 

I was speaking out about what was effective, what wasn’t effective about, and what I was talking about while it was true and accurate was very different than the public perception of what happened because the public was misled, right? It was misled intentionally that the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, program was safe, was necessary, was effective, because that was their talking points, to try to shirk any accountability for it, to try to say, this is why we were so great. And so a group called Human Rights First came to me. 

And they had a program where they were trying to counter torture and said, we need your voice. Because we need you to publicly say what you’re saying here in these meetings. 

They asked me to speak out and Jose Rodriguez, who was the chief of the counterterrorism center of the CIA, when this EIT program, and while they call it EIT, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, I call it what it really was, excuses to inflict torture. And so that’s what the program really was, is just trying to come up with the excuse is we’re under threat and it’s safe. What we’re doing safe, and we know it wasn’t, what we’re doing is effective, and we know it wasn’t, what we do is necessary. We know all that wasn’t the case. But the narrative was that it was that, and Jose Rodriguez was writing a book called Hard Measures where he was trying to claim credit about all the great stuff they did. And so Human Rights First came to me and said: will you write an op-ed? 

And I wrote one in Huffington Post that said, you know, you know, the torture is illegal, immoral, ineffective, and inconsistent with American values. Right? and we brought together a number of interrogation professionals from the Intel community and from the law enforcement community. I mean, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lieutenant General Stoyer, former chiefs of station of the CIA, who all said that interrogation is wrong. And so we put out a statement of principles for President Obama, and I became kind of the lead for the National Security Professionals Program of Human Rights First, trying to get the narrative changed within the media, and we did. 

We met with members of the press. We met at the New York Times, The Washington Post and said, please stop the narrative that human rights advocates call this torture. Torture is torture. 

A lot of people encouraged me to write my story because it’s much different than the public narrative about this at the time. And I was at an event when I met with John McCain, who was really one of my heroes and he knew of what I had done, on the CITF because the CITF was the one that discovered, the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, prisoner 63, would have been the 20th hijacker and that of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, prisoner 760, who wrote the book, The Guantanamo Diaries. And so I was the one that alerted the senior leadership of the DOD and the Navy that these methodologies that were supposed to be done in secret within the CIA were migrating to the Department of Defense. And as the most senior counterterrorism official responsible for investigating them, I had an obligation to alert my chain of command of this because it was clear in my mind that this would be contrary to the president’s military order of November 2001 that said we would treat prisoners humanely. And so I had an order that I was executing that said we would treat prisoners humanely and was clear that others were not. And John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, both I spoke to them at a Human Rights First event where they were both being celebrated because we had just gotten the release of the torture report. And so Human Rights First asked me to speak out and encourage them to release the torture report executive summary. 

This is like 500 some odd pages of a 10,000 page report, right? That’s still highly classified. you know, we were trying to say we needed to, we need to get this report out so that we learned some lessons from it, right? Because we did some really horrible things. I mean, the depths of depravity of the program are still coming out. But we need to do this. And John McCain said, you need to write your book. You know, your story needs, people need to understand what happened, you know, with you and your task force it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t a whistleblower. I was a high ranking government official saying this is this is wrong, right? This is a bit. This is contrary to our values, contrary to law. And I have an obligation, I have a duty and obligation to try to prevent that and so that’s what really propelled me to write it. My intent was to write it as a leadership book, right? To try to have people take a look at it, to see what it was like having to make some decisions that were frankly unpopular, right? To oppose the secretary of defense, to oppose the president and vice president at a time when people were under threat and afraid and to feel that the commitment to the oath of office was more important than my career, right? Understanding that that position would probably derail my upward mobility, right? And it could result in sanctions. I was the deputy commander of CITF. The commander was an Army Colonel, Britt Malo. And we actually sat down and discussed whether he could be court-martialed for this, or could I be brought up on charges or fired? But we sat down with our lawyers and made decision that we have an affirmative obligation not to follow an unlawful order. 

And it was clear to us that the order to inflict human rights violations against a prisoner in custody was unlawful. There is no way that that is lawful order. And so whether we liked it or not, and whether it had an adverse consequence on us or not, we had an obligation to stand up and take whatever consequences happen. And so I wanted the book to be that leadership lesson for others who might be in a position like me in the future. 

And so through my career, I often would find myself to talk truth to power. And that was a distinct advantage that I had and NCIS had because others within the military structure all reported to those local military commanders. And so I may have had a little more flexibility in my ability to say not just “no”, but “hell no”. You know that this isn’t going to happen on my watch because it was clear to me that I was the senior NCIS person involved and Guantanamo was a naval station, that crimes are going to be committed on a naval installation under my watch. And so I had to let the Navy leadership know that this was going to happen having no idea frankly that anyone would actually consider doing this and thinking it would produce positive results. I actually thought that this was just some inapt generals or people at lower levels who thought they were doing good but didn’t understand an actual interview interrogation and didn’t kind of think through the strategic implications down the road what might happen if they did so. So when I challenged what was happening, I didn’t know it was already policy. I didn’t know the depths of depravity or the fact that the CIA was already doing some really horrible things in these dark prisons and black sites. It was inconceivable to me at the time. And it’s still amazing now that we would have engaged in that. Because it is so abhorrent and so contrary to our values as a country, as a country that is founded on human rights. 

The tone of my book changed during the presidential primaries where Donald Trump and the Republican candidates started to say that torture was effective and we’ll go back to torture and something worse that will restore Guantanamo. 

I really wanted it to be a book that someone could look at and understand what really happened on the inside. I’m not some researcher who’s read a bunch of stuff and then tried to… This happened to me, right? This was my life. I mean, I was at these meetings. I was there in the heat of the battle at the tip of the spear. So it wasn’t my analysis of what somebody else did. This was me just telling what I could of a story. 

And nothing in the book is classified. would not divulge classified information. Just wouldn’t do it. I used to investigate people who had done that. Exactly. But the redactions in my book were there. There’s 113 redactions. And my book was held up 179 days before publication because what I write is embarrassing.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So I’ve seen all that and I thought all that was kind of because it was secret.  

Mark Fallon: 

No, none of it was. I mean, things from congressional hearings that I wrote about were redacted. Articles in newspapers that I wrote about were redacted because it told a story that was more compelling or had more sources applied to what I was saying that made my story more palatable rather than just my story. And as an investigator, what do you do? You look for supporting evidence. And so that’s some of the things that were redacted is me finding some of those things that supported what I was contending in the book. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And indeed, for investigators, a narrative is what is supposed to connect the evidence and make it a coherent case.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah. I’m frustrated at how little of the practitioners, got it, and were trying to apply it, there was no kind of cultural assimilation. This wasn’t taking hold as meaningful. The police were not accepting the behavioral sciences, the psychological sciences in the same manner in which they accepted the physical sciences, like DNA, right? They accept DNA, but they’re not kind of getting that the psychological sciences have value to apply as well. And they looked at this and what they did is they said, listen, here’s the thing, there’s two different cultures at work here. Right? You have practitioners operating in this operational silo. You have academics operating in this silo. And neither really understand each other. You know, there’s some isolated circle, say, where they do. But as communities, they do not. As communities of research, communities of practice, they don’t have a good understanding. And they do not work well together. And the problem is…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The relationship has been called the conversation of the deaf. It gets too messy when people like you and me get involved Mark. Yeah, it becomes uncomfortable because we challenge the norm. We’re in it for the application and the value and the complexity that guys like you and me have to deal with. It’s messy.  

But as you say, and that’s probably that might be a reason why by these two silos still seems to thrive as as just that. 

Mark Fallon: 

But what we did is we commissioned a book, and we found a publisher who would agree that the electronic version would have no paywalls. So we went around the world and we picked a number of researchers that we thought could have the most impact on practice. Pär Anders Granhag. He’s one. I mean, we looked at the cognitive area. Let’s ask Ron Fisher to write a chapter on the cognitive interview. We want to talk about research methodologies. We went to Melissa Rossano. We want to talk about memory and other things. We went around the world and we picked who do we think could kind of contribute to this. 

And we said, write this with practitioners in mind. And so we, just this past December, it was published, interviewing and interrogation, a review of history of research and practice since World War II, because we wanted to have something that could create a cognitive opening within practitioners that this psychological science, that this body of research could help them do their job better. And each of the chapters can be downloaded separately and it is available at no cost.  

And so that’s what’s kind of exciting and encouraging now is that there are these pockets of excellence in policing. Los Angeles is doing some incredible work. I just had a call yesterday with a district attorney, a prosecutor, a Vern Pierson in El Dorado County, California, who has established his own interrogation training program for investigators because he was getting bad data. Right as a prosecutor, he wasn’t getting the type of information from the interrogation that he needed to try cases. So, and he brings ORBIT as a foundational aspect of it. And he has a program and he’s trying to rewrite legislation in California to ban the false evidence ploy. Right, and I work now with the Innocence Project and I’ve now testified before 10 different state legislators to try to get them to evolve from the traditional confession-driven methodologies that we know produce false confessions, that we know are less effective in obtaining accurate, reliable information than the science-based methods, but that are still being utilized. And when I talk to police organizations or before legislative bodies, when the police are afraid you’re taking our tools away. No, no, we’re replacing your antiquated tools. You wouldn’t issue a firearm that haphazardly misfires and hits unintended targets and innocent victims, nor should you with your interrogation program. Because what you’re doing is haphazardly getting false results and you’re getting wrongful convictions. 

Which is horrible in and of itself but it’s a menace to society because the actual perpetrator remains on the street to prey on other victims and your law enforcement officers, particularly with a false evidence ploy where you’re lying about what the evidence is you’re promoting a culture of deceit and deception in a law enforcement organization. You’re saying it’s okay to lie, to witness. Not just suspect, but somebody you suspect, they may be a witness, but I’m gonna lie to them about the facts and try to see if they’re a suspect. And they go back to their community and say, the police just lied to me and said they had me on camera and I wasn’t even there. And so we talk about in the US how, you know, there’s a lack of trust in policing that were challenged by recruitment and retention of police officers. 

Well, when you’re deceiving the public the trust factor just isn’t there right? How do you then when you go back to your community say please lie to me? So I advocate policing with virtue, like the police should be the good guys. You should police with virtue because that’s a step closer to community to embrace policing. You want your  community to embrace police? You know, we’re there for the force of good and and so it should be embraced for a sounder criminal justice process, so that’s what I have.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You probably can go beyond that, I guess, Mark, and say that for general dignity and mutual respect and understanding as human beings.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, that’s one of the aspects we hit on in the Mendes Principles about professionalism. And so we spend, you know, when I was at NCIS, I spent a lot of time in the firing range, right? I had to continuously qualify, re-qualify quarterly to ensure I was proficient with a handgun that I may have pulled, but never fired, you know, in the line of duty. But I did an interview interrogation just about every day. Never had to reestablish my proficiency. Never had any, you know, had any mandatory follow-on training. You know, there was voluntary training and there was training provided in that area. But it wasn’t looked at as something that you could add new competencies to. Because you didn’t know that this research was ongoing. And of course at the time we didn’t have this research. But now there is. It was like, if there was some new firing technique that made your judgment better, or made your weapon better, or made you a better shot or a better marksman or have better gun fighting skills, it would be in your training program so that you were more accurate. Well, we have research now that can ensure that you’re more accurate in your interviews and interrogations. However, other than pockets of excellence, it’s not being implemented. 

LAPD was the first people that I helped train, they’ve gone out now and they’re doing training in those programs. FLETC, Federal Enforcement Training Center, the largest law enforcement training center in the US here, has totally revamped their training program and now uses science to train all the federal agents that they train within the US, which they didn’t do before. 

And so I am very pleased to see those changes. NCIS, my former organization, the director had come out to the field, said, I don’t care how you’ve previously been trained. 

I don’t care how your previous practice has been, from this day forward, we will only use research to inform our practice of interviewing interrogation. And so we’re hoping for a greater paradigm shift. 

Where there has not been that same type of culture adaptation is in the state and local law enforcement level in the US here, unfortunately. We don’t have a central law enforcement authority in the US. Every state can be different within the same county. A county could have different protocols than a city. And so there’s no kind of central authority. And so what you hope to do is influence. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I guess one of the fundamental, you’re pointing to the system of how the entire law enforcement community is built up in the US, which of course is quite different at least from where I come from, Norway, where as you’re probably aware of, it’s a bachelor program that leaves room for much more critical reflection and foundation for every single officer. And of course, that creates a better outset, I guess, for this kind of embracing and also merging the silos. I guess from the very beginning, there is no conflict between practice and research because that’s your mother milk.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, you have a much greater emphasis as it should be on education. We do not overhear, I mean, NCIS requires a college degree. Some other agencies do not. So you don’t have that kind of educational focus to kind of advance that way and to be able to engage in scholarships simultaneously because it does impact your practice. 

You’re a better practitioner because of your knowledge. You’re a better practitioner because of your scholarship.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly. still, have this… I remember very vividly, Mark, when it was introduced in Norway, a bachelor in policing. Because I was the second-last class without it. So I remember when I think I was probably one of them being really worried about all these nerdy theoretical guys who were supposed to follow us and how would they be able to both read books and do the job. there is this thing and I think it’s not because you’re against it, it’s genuine worry that we’re doing an important job and we have to make sure we’re doing it the right way. So don’t think it’s like they don’t really respect it, but it’s built on a genuine worry that we know how to do it. And we might take some advice, but we won’t throw it all overboard to someone who have never done it before.  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, and the other part is kind of the op tempo here. I mean, you know, in NCIS, very operational, a lot going on. You know, I was always engaged in, you know, high level task force, high level investigations. There wasn’t a lot of time. Right. And so there was a program where you could attend the Naval War College one year and get a master’s degree. But there was never enough time to give a year out of my operational world to kind of take that break. And, you know, and so the people who got it. 

Were the ones that may have been between assignments Or could have had the time to attend those things, but you know through my career there was never enough time but you know in Norway, it’s part of your culture right that that that that is part of what is it accepted that would make you a better leader And certainly, you know, I went through leadership training in NCIS They realized that that that type of That type of training made me a better leader attending those schools But it’s that level of kind of research that is kind of a separate silo. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly, but I think also what happens is, you know, slowly, slowly, societies are developing into higher and higher education for on average. And if the police and the law enforcement don’t follow, we will fall behind. And, you know, you won’t be taken seriously by the people you’re supposed to serve. 

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, there are exceptions. mentioned, I don’t have a PhD. I have a bachelor’s degree, right? Yet I have an experience base that helps my knowledge, right? So I have a high degree of knowledge that hasn’t resulted in a degree, right? I guest lecture at a lot of law schools. I guest lecture for psychologists and I guest lecture for lawyers. So there are folks who will embrace…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

That says a lot of what your work has meant, Mark. And the reason why we’re having you as a guest on our podcast is exactly that. You are exceptional in the way that you are able to convey this message to so many different audiences that can bring about change. So I would just like to ask you before we round off, from where you go, you are probably the scholar, because I think about you as a scholar, who are invited to the most important places in the world. You visit places and offices and talk to decision makers far more than any other scholar that I know. From your point of view, where is the wind blowing right now? 

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, I’ve been very, very encouraged recently. It was Saul Kassin who insisted that the Innocence Project contact me. And so he… for years has been saying you’re, know, they were in their echo chamber as well. Right. And so they didn’t go to practitioners for the most part. And so I said, you need to hear Mark Fallon speak because his voice is unique. Right. From probably what you’re hearing. And, you know, they have asked me now to speak, as I said, 10 different state legislatures. 

And I’ve done press conferences with them in the ACLU. And I oftentimes speak with an exoneree sitting next to me, someone who falsely confessed to a crime they didn’t commit. And I’ll start my presentation by saying, I used to believe that an innocent person wouldn’t confess to a crime they didn’t commit. I was wrong. And he’s going to tell you why I was wrong. And then they will tell their story or something like that. 

And so I speak for a number of different innocence projects. And they bring me out and I speak to legislators. I’ll speak to police organizations and i’ll talk then about some of the things that I’m talking to you about you know in telling maybe truth of power, but try to create this cognitive opening that what you understand or what you believe? May be different right? We once thought the world was flat You know, we want you know, you know some things that some our beliefs change right, but these cognitive openings are occurring within the state legislatures to a degree. Now I’m very encouraged, Minnesota just signed a bill banning deception and police interrogations with juveniles. There’s no state that has banned it with adults yet. Now some departments won’t do it, but there’s not a legislative ban on it, which I think it needs to be to really have the cultural change because of the damage that it’s the people don’t realize the damage it’s done financially. So within the U.S. exonerees have been awarded four billion dollars in settlements, four billion. Right. And so the problem with that, that’s not impacting individual police departments. It’s impacting their city’s budgets. It’s impacting the state’s budget, it is impacting the taxpayers. But that’s not filtering down to the city budget, because those cases usually aren’t completed till 20 years after the person’s had a wrongful conviction. Right. So those those officers who involved in that have moved on. There’s no accountability, things like that. And so most recently, within the last year, the NCJFCJ, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges reached out to me. And they were encouraged to talk to me. And one of the judges on their steering committee for their conferences, which usually brings 600-700 judges together from around the country, basically told me, you don’t realize how ignorant we are as judges about what you’re saying. And I teased her and said, well, I think I do. 

But they they brought me out to speak at their conference last february in Cleveland Ohio and I spoke with the co-founder of the innocence project Peter Neufeld talking about their efforts nationally and with Terrill Swift and exoneree who i’ve spoken with before to the judges and the feedback was exceptional and so the judges are now saying, wait, I’m saying you are making bad decisions. Right. You’re making decisions. Your prosecutors are making decisions based on information that’s being involuntarily obtained. Right. That they are being coerced and so you’re making bad judgments and here are the results of those. $4 billion is being paid out, you know, here in this state.  

I’ve been asked to participate in a movement coming up in the state of Pennsylvania to just have police record their interrogations. Right, that they still don’t record. NCIS was the first federal agency to mandate recording interrogations. And they didn’t do it for human rights purpose. They did it because of what we call it the CSI effect. Jurors watch TV. They think something should be this way. So we were afraid that jurors weren’t believing our rapport-based methods. So we wanted to videotape it so they could see that the interrogation was really voluntary. We wanted them to see that our practice was a rapport-based practice. And so that’s the encouraging. So what we’re hoping is that we get to a point where, frankly, the public will no longer tolerate in that practice, that police administrators will no longer tolerate that their practice may be contributing to the degradation of trust between police and the communities they serve. That the public itself will no longer tolerate deceptive police practice. They will insist upon the fact that police should be professional and that they should actually be utilizing science to inform and to reform the practice of interviewing interrogation. Well, there are indications and warnings that there could be a cultural shift.  

But we have to keep the pressure on. We have to continue. We can’t rest on our laurels. We can’t say, I wrote this book, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. We have to say that this is an evolutionary process. I was discouraged for a long time about the inability for the HIG research to trickle down. Now I am encouraged. I am encouraged by what I hear and what I see around the country in pockets. 

I’ll be really delighted when I see kind of the cultural transformation away from confession-driven to information gathering, and then the understanding that science can inform the practice and make us better at what we do. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I feel confident, Mark, as long as you are around, that wind will continue blowing. Just talking to you today have encouraged me that also there is time to get you back to Europe again, because the way you are able to deliver a message is absolutely unique. So first of all, I have to say that, and you know I mean it. And I also have to thank you as a fellow citizen of the world that for all the time you’re spending on actually making this change come through I would like to round off this interview with asking you the question. Do you sometimes have a feeling that you are naive, that you are trying to fight windmills? Or why are you doing this?  

Mark Fallon: 

Yeah, I’m a smart Alec from New Jersey, so the short answer is I don’t have any hobbies. Or I don’t know any better. You know, my whole life has been dedicated to public service. I mean, I’ve only known really kind of government service. 

My father was a police officer, deputy chief of police. My father-in-law is my father’s partner. My grandmother was the town clerk in my town. My uncle was a councilman, so I’m not, while I believe in capitalism, not motivated by profit. I feel that citizens of the world, you know, I like Roosevelt’s quote, you know, he talks about the man in the arena and everyone remembers that card, but he also said that citizens in a republic have a responsibility. And he said that, you know, that high tide raises all boats. And so what I do realize is how unique my voice is. 

And I realize it’s because of those experiences, right? It’s not, it’s because I was thrown into situations and had to survive, right? And with the recognition that, to survive, I’ve had to rely on others, right? And so now, you know, I’m 68 years old. I realize I have much more time behind me than I have ahead of me that my voice is one that has some type of meeting now. And I will continue to speak out as long as I’m relevant and as long as my message is for the forces of good, for the lack of a better term. So I’ll continue to use my voice and my pen or my background and expertise to try to be something that could inform society because I think that that’s citizens in a republic have that obligation as Roosevelt said and so and I believe I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and I don’t believe anyone’s ever kind of taken that oath away from me. So I feel that some of the things that are practiced have been collectively unconstitutional, right, tortures unconstitutional and so hopefully, what I say will resonate with certain people who will then carry that message on. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I feel certain it will, Mark. So by that, I would thank you so much for taking your time to get this into you today.  

Mark Fallon: 

Well, it is a genuine honor, Ivar, to do this. I am encouraged by what you have done and what you are doing, your voice. So thank you for the opportunity to use my voice on your podcast and to be invited to spend some delightful time with you. 

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.