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.