A television cop slams his or her hand on the table, looms over the suspect and shouts accusations. The withering suspect eventually confesses. High drama, great viewing, but is it how it really happens?
Police want what happened and who done it?
A look at how police talk to suspects and eye witnesses was instigated in the 1980’s. Subsequent research found that police in Britain either ignored the procedure or did not understand it. Training police in the methods for interviewing suspects, witnesses, and victims is based around four techniques.
In contrast to our television cops, police follow strategies that go against how we communicate. In every day conversation we ask questions we do not want fully answered, talk over each other, and do not listen carefully to what others say. Every time a police officer asks a question they stop the person interviewed from talking. Questions can also upset a witness or victim’s memory of events.
Police are now trained in cognitive interview techniques.
In reality, it is impossible to interview someone without asking questions. The open question is a way to get a person to say in their own words everything they saw ans heard, no matter how insignificant it may seem. Only the police can decide what is vital and what is not.
Context reinstatement questions are designed to get a person to picture in their mind exactly where they were, objects, and people around them. In a way, go back in their imagination to hear sounds and events going on at the time.
Another technique is called revers temporal order of recall. From an early age we develop a fear of the unknown. To cope with this, we invent stories about what happened to hold in our memory. By asking a person to recall what happened from the last thing they saw or heard at a point in time and remember backwards, unravels details lost in the original telling of events.
Changing perspective technique is a question asking some one to focus on one aspect of an event. All of us are for ourselves—we see, hear, and feel things in the way it impacts us. If asked to describe a situation from another view point, forces us to think and remember in a new way, to look at the bigger picture outside our own way of seeing. Such a technique has limitation and would not be used for certain crimes such as sexual assault.
Unlike our television law enforcement heroes, the most effective techniques to get information to help piece together the often complicated puzzle involving crime, is to shut-up and let the suspect do the talking.
ajhenryblog 