Episode 08.
Moving away from “common sense” interviewing – conversation with Prof. Ray Bull

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.