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.