Investigative interviewing – the process of obtaining accurate and complete accounts from victims, witnesses and suspects – is the lifeblood of the criminal justice system.
When a crime occurs, someone usually knows something. But the way a police interview is conducted doesn’t simply determine whether information is obtained. It shapes the reliability and completeness of that information – and the credibility of everything that follows in the criminal justice process.
For much of the 20th century (and in many places still today), police largely used accusatory, non-evidence-based interrogation methods that heighten the risk of false confessions.
Research examining police interviews with suspects – notably John Baldwin’s 1992 study of over 600 interviews in England and Wales, commissioned by the UK Home Office – showed that officers routinely relied on assumption and confirmation-seeking, rather than genuinely open-minded information gathering.
False confessions were occasionally extracted from innocent people, witness accounts were shaped by the questions put to them, and the reliability of evidence was often compromised from the moment of its collection.
