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Journal of Contemporary Criminal

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986210377107

2010 26: 426Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeDavid Dixon

Questioning Suspects: A Comparative Perspective

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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

26(4) 426440

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986210377107

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Questioning Suspects:

A Comparative Perspective

David Dixon1

Abstract

This article contrasts the ways in which English-speaking jurisdictions have responded to

concerns about practices in the police interrogation of suspects. Since the mid-1990s,a stark contrast has developed between the methods taught to North American policeofficers via the Reid Technique and similar U.S. training programs and the strategy ofinvestigative interviewing in England and Wales (and increasingly elsewhere in Europeand Australasia). This policy divergence must be understood in the context of differingresponses to miscarriages of justice and investigative failures (caused, at least in part,by inefficient interrogation techniques) and the knowledge which inquiries into thesemiscarriages and failures produced. While investigative interviewing is part of a responseto criminal process failure which sees both wrongful convictions and failed prosecutions

as problematic, the United States has been slow to acknowledge the scale of a problemwhich has not only convicted (and executed) the innocent, but also failed to bringthe guilty to justice. Drawing on empirical research in Australia, where audio-visualrecording has been used routinely since the early 1990s, the article notes the limits andbenefits of electronic recording, which too often is presented as a panacea. The articlenotes that most discussion of American interrogation takes place in an empirical vacuumand expresses doubts about the prevalent accounts of police practice. It also notessome recent interest in the United States in alternative approaches to interrogatingsuspects which have developed from the experience of questioning terrorist suspects.

Keywords

interrogation, investigative interviewing, audio-visual recording, criminal investigation

Comparing Interrogation

This article contrasts the ways in which English-speaking jurisdictions have responded

to concerns about practices in the police interrogation of suspects. Since the mid-1990s,

1University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Corresponding Author:

David Dixon, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

Email: [email protected]

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Dixon 427

a stark contrast has developed between the methods taught to North American police

officers via the Reid Technique and similar U.S. training programs and the strategy

of investigative interviewing in England and Wales. It will be argued that this con-

trast must be understood in the context of differing responses to miscarriages ofjustice and investigative failures (caused, at least in part, by inefficient interrogation

techniques) and the knowledge which inquiries into these miscarriages and failures

produced.

In a criminal justice world increasingly characterised by policy transfer and con-

vergence (Jones & Newburn, 2007), interrogation bucks the trend, with notable differ-

ences between dominant, approved models in the United States and the United Kingdom

(with Australia, New Zealand and some European countries following the latter). Not

long ago, the situation was more consistent with the criminal justice norm, with the

United States having a significant influence on the United Kingdom (Walkley, 1987).The first objective of this article is to examine some of the conditions of this policy

divergence.

Interrogating in the United States

The dominant U.S. model requires little description to anyone familiar with fictional

police procedurals. Once a suspect has been identified through preliminary investi-

gation and questioning, accusatory interrogation techniques are used to draw out a

confession. The suspect may resist, but the expertise of the police detective leads himor her to crack and to confess, providing neat dramatic closure.

A key source of these fictions is the training manuals used by U.S. police. There are

a number, but the most successful is Inbau and Reids Criminal Interrogation and

Confessions, the most influential approach and the predominant model of interroga-

tion used by law enforcement professionals in the United States (Borum, Gelles, &

Kleinman, 2009, p. 117). First published in 1962 and currently in its fourth edition

(Inbau, Reid, Buckley, & Jayne, 2001), this manual (and associated training courses)

teaches the Reid nine step technique. The history of the Reid Technique is almost a

history of how questioning of suspects developed in the United States. As Richard Leohas shown (2008), modern interrogations origins were in the reaction against the

violence in treatment of suspects which became a scandal in the 1930s. Police sought

alternatives to violence and found it in training manuals such as Inbau and Reid which

showed them how to get confessions from suspects without physical coercion. In its

place was put psychological coercion and manipulation: indeed, the history of inter-

rogation provides a great casestudy of the influence of psychology in American life

or, more specifically, of a highly influential form of unscientific, lay psychology.

Psychological pressure is therefore at the heart of police interrogation in the United

States (Leo, 2008).In the Reid Technique, a suspect is only interrogated after initial informal interview-

ing makes the investigator confident of his or her guilt. This is a crucial stage, because

thereafter the investigators aim is to obtain a confession confirming the original

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428 Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 26(4)

suspicion. However much those associated with the Reid Technique defend their

model, it is its Achilles heel. It is now almost a clich to point out that many investi-

gations have gone astray (and some led to miscarriages of justice) by investigators

deciding too early that their case theory is correct, then interrogating to have it con-firmed, and ignoring inconveniently contrary evidence or alternative lines of inquiry

along the way.

In the Reid Technique, once the investigator moves from interview to interrogation,

psychological pressure is put on the suspect by building up anxiety and facilitating

confession. The suspect is helped to confess by, for example, the investigator suggest-

ing plausible accounts of what occurred which minimise the suspects culpability,

immorality or social abnormality. Interrogators may lie to suspects, typically about

the evidence available against him or her. Like most other U.S. interrogation styles, the

Reid Technique puts considerable emphasis on the ability of interrogators to read thesuspects body language.

Whatever else the Reid Technique may be, it has to be understood as a commercial

product. In the vast literature which has accumulated on privatization of policing in

recent decades (Button, 2002), remarkably little attention has been paid to the role of

corporate providers of training and other services (including interrogation). The Reid

Technique is a product which has been sold in the form both of manuals and training

courses. Others compete in the criminal justice market place, but John E Reid &

Associates Inc. retains a dominant position. Such companies increasingly go beyond

training, providing contracted interrogation services either in an advisory or operationalcapacity. Given these commercial realities, it is little wonder that those associated with

Reid & Associates fiercely defend their brand and counter-attack against its critics

(e.g., Buckley, 2000).

Also like other producers of U.S. training manuals, Reid & Associates claim that

their technique is validated by long operational experience and success. Its critics

argue that there has been no scientific evaluation. Rather, the science is that pecu-

liar brand of lay psychology which infiltrated everyday thinking in the 20th century.

Indeed, Borum introduces his review of the American literature by stating

Almost no empirical studies in the social and behavioral sciences directly address

the effectiveness of interrogation in general practice, or of specific techniques

in generating accurate and useful information from otherwise uncooperative

suspects (Buckley, 2006, p. 18).

Borum et al. are scathing about the lack of science underpinning nearly half a

century of U.S. doctrine (2009, p. 123).

There is no doubt that such techniques produce confessions: this is why they have

been so consistently popular in U.S. law enforcement. The key problem is that thereliability of such confessions cannot be guaranteed: as will be shown below, the rec-

ognition of miscarriages of justice and investigative failures have made this a major

concern.



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Dixon 429

Investigative Interviewing and PEACE

The approved model for questioning suspects in England and Wales is, by design, very

different from the Reid Technique. This approach has been widely adopted in NewZealand and Australia (Ord, Shaw, & Green, 2004) and is attracting increasing interest

in continental Europe (Williamson, Milne, & Savage, 2009). It sees questioning as

investigative rather than accusatory: officers are warned against assuming the suspects

guilt and are encouraged to investigate with an open mind. Eschewing the coercive

implications of the term interrogation, the preferred title investigative interviewing

is deliberate and significant. Investigative interviewing is usually structured around a

series of stages expressed by the mnemonic PEACE, which means: preparation and

planning; engage and explain; account, clarification and challenge; closure; and evalua-

tion. At the heart of investigative interviewing is a simple, but crucial shift of emphasis:rather than setting out to gain a confession which confirms a case theory to which the

officer is firmly committed, the interrogating officer is encouraged to get the suspects

account and then to check its authenticity by questioning and testing it against other

evidence. Deception of suspects and psychological coercion of the kind used in the Reid

Technique are unacceptable, and any resulting evidence should be inadmissible. In the

broader investigative context, questioning of suspects is downgraded: it is just one of a

series of skills, including questioning witnesses (Milne & Bull, 1999; NCF, 1998).

Unlike Inbau and Reid, exponents of investigative interviewing can point to its

origin in extensive empirical research on the questioning of suspects as justificationof this approach. Such research was particularly influential because it was sponsored

by official inquiries into criminal justice or as part of the evaluation of legislation

prompted by such inquiries. Crucially, extensive research in England and Wales chal-

lenged the belief that police questioning of suspects involves tense difficult encoun-

ters in which suspects resist and have to be coerced into confession. On the contrary,

UK researchers found that most interviews involve relatively simple and straightfor-

ward interchanges with reasonably compliant suspects who were such co-operative

individuals that they should have presented no serious difficulties to a moderately

competent interviewer (Baldwin, 1993, pp. 331, 332). Subsequent research in Australiaproduced similar findings (Dixon, 2007).

The investigative interviewing model therefore assumes that nonconflictual interac-

tion between police and suspect is possible as the latter is asked to provide an account

which is checked against other evidence. Indeed, one early criticism of investigative

interviewing was its difficulty in dealing with the minority of suspects who were non-

cooperative and hostile. This was a factor in the development of the PEACE model into

five tiers to cater for officers at different stages of their careers and for dealing with

different types of crimes (Griffiths & Milne, 2006, p. 167).

While the American model assumes that properly trained officers will acquire theskill necessary to break down resistant suspects (which includes dominating the suspect

through isolation and behavioural control), the investigative interviewing model down-

grades confession as the objective of questioning suspects in favour of information



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gathering. In the latter, training focuses on basic principles of good interaction rather

than specialist skills (although such training is also provided in the higher tiers of the

model: see below). That suspects deception can be visually detected appears to be

taken for granted in most American studies, almost the opposite is true among expo-nents of investigative interviewing (at least as regards everyday policing).

Like the Reid Technique, investigative interviewing has to be understood as a product.

While its commercial aspects are less significant, it would be nave to overlook its

material dimension: books are sold and academic and practitioner careers have been

progressed on the back of investigative interviewing. If U.S. interrogation has to be

understood as a commercial product, investigative interviewing has some of the char-

acteristics of a social movement. It was championed by a moral and policy entrepreneur

in the late (and sadly missed) Tom Williamson, an influential senior police officer

whose commitment to improving investigative practice had a strong ethical foundation(Grieve, 2009). Investigative interviewing was developed by a group of psychologists

and police practitioners. Its influence spread through a network of police trainers and

academic psychologists, notably through the International Investigative Interviewing

conferences.

In the enthusiasm to promote an alternative to the Reid Technique, the impact

of investigative interviewing is sometimes exaggerated (e.g., Meissner, Russano, &

Narchet, 2010, p. 115), so the limited evaluative literature needs to be considered care-

fully. An early official appraisal of investigative interviewing was positive (McGurk,

Carr, & McGurk, 1993), but a much more critical assessment was provided by Clarkeand Milne (2001). Officers were found to be not using the specific techniques of PEACE:

indeed, there was little difference between the performance of officers who were

trained and those who were not. While the results may be disappointing, it would be a

mistake to adopt Sanders and Youngs conclusion that investigative interviewing has

been a failure (2003, p. 242). While Clarke and Milne found few statistically signifi-

cant differences between trained and untrained officers, they rightly note that the

possibility of finding an untrained sample that is nave and has not been influenced in

some way by PEACE interviewing is remote (2001, p. 100). As they suggest, it would

be more appropriate to compare the interviews in their sample as a whole with thoseconducted before PEACEs introduction in 1991. From this perspective, there was

clear evidence . . . that since the introduction of PEACE an improvement in the ethos

and ethical approach to interviewing has taken place (2001, p. 100) and PEACE

training has developed the skills used by police officers to interview suspects of crime

(2001, p. 113). While ten per cent of the sample was rated as possibly breaching the

Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which regulates questioning via a detailed

code of practice (2001, p. 100), the picture presented is very different from the per-

vasive misconduct and incompetence found earlier by earlier researchers. A signifi-

cant lesson to learn from Clarke and Milnes review is that it is difficult to separate anyspecific impact of investigative interviewing from the broader process of change in

British policing which, as will be shown below, flowed from recognition of miscar-

riages and failures.



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Dixon 431

PEACE is more important for its impact in undermining previously accepted strategies

than for the specific techniques of information gathering and checking which it incorpo-

rates. A frequent response to an explanation of the investigative interviewing approach

is that it is just common sense. People say this because it resonates with commonexperience of interviewing in other contexts. Its exponents often ground their approach

in claims to common sense (e.g., Shepherd, 2007). But of course this common

sense is very different from that based on American ideas about how suspects behave

and how police must respond in order to obtain evidence.

Miscarriages of Justice and Investigative Failures

In order to understand how and why approved models of interrogation have diverged

so markedly in England and Wales and the United States, the role of miscarriages ofjustice and investigative failures must be understood.

The starting point must be recognition that miscarriages of justice and investiga-

tive failures were disturbingly common in the 20th century. It has become clear that

violence and verballing are not required to produce a false confession: persistent

questioning, misrepresentation of other evidence, lengthy detention, and the uninten-

tional leaking of information to suspects can produce unreliable confessions, particu-

larly (but not necessarily) if the suspect is vulnerable through, inter alia, youth, mental

illness, or intellectual disability. The short-term benefitrelief from the questioning

may seem worthwhile, even if its long-term cost may be enormous. Confident beliefthat people will act rationally and in their best interests is inappropriate and potentially

very misleading in the context of police interrogation. Developments in DNA science

have fundamentally changed the situation, providing something closer to positive proof

of innocence. DNA analysis may prove not only that the convicted person was not

guilty, but may identify the real offender.

a. England and Wales: From Confait to Heron

The criminal justice process in Britain gained some appreciation of this reality througha long series of proven miscarriages and investigative failures. This series began with

Confait and ran through a series in which the Guildford 4 and Birmingham 6 were the

most publicised (Walker & Starmer, 1999). These provided a background of distrust of

police and shaken confidence in beliefs about the matchless superiority of English jus-

tice. While domestic commentators (e.g., Sanders & Young, 2003) stress the continuing

problems of criminal justice in the United Kingdom, what is striking from an interna-

tional comparative perspective has been the way in which official response has followed

a pattern of official inquiry, academic research, and substantial action. This is not to look

through rose-tinted glasses: official recognition came late and often reluctantly; crucialadvances were made not by academics but by investigative reporters; and the reforms

have proved fragile. Nevertheless, there have been achievements not matched in other

jurisdictions.



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In England and Wales, miscarriages became major public scandals in a way that the

American (and, despite Chamberlain, the Australian) cases have not. This recognition

led directly to reforms of justice processes in which provision of substantial rights for

suspects has been achieved without reducing crime control efficiency (indeed frommany perspectives increasing it). The Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure of

1978-1981 led to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which introduced wide-

ranging protections for suspects, including time-limited detention before charge, con-

temporaneous (now electronic) recording, access for vulnerable suspects to appropriate

adults and, crucially, publicly-funded and organised legal advice schemes. Criminal

investigation is regulated by a complex network of legal and administrative rules. The

secrecy of police stations was challenged: officers became used to seeing solicitors,

social workers, family members and researchers in custody areas. And, despite the fears

of many, the sky remained in the heavens, suspects continued to confess, and policeeffectiveness was not reduced. On the contrary, the general response of police was ret-

rospectively to welcome the new criminal process.

While many of the well-known miscarriages of justice involved false confessions,

two less publicised cases had the decisive influence on interrogation methods by mak-

ing the police realise that change was needed (and that if they did not change them-

selves, that change would be imposed). First, in the Cardiff 3case (Dixon, 1997,

pp. 171-172), the Court of Appeal delivered damning criticism of police practices in

interrogating suspects. As had been happened in theConfait case 20 years before,

subsequent disclosures caused even more problems for the police: Sekars relentlessinvestigative journalism (1997) and the development of DNA science proved not just

that the Cardiff 3s conviction had been legally unsustainable, but that it was factually

wrong: someone with whom they had no connection was eventually convicted.

The second case, Heron, was a miscarriage of a different kind (Dixon, 1997,

pp. 174-176; Gudjonsson, 2003). This was not a false conviction, but a botched inves-

tigation which led to a prosecution which collapsed around the exclusion from evi-

dence of an improperly obtained confession, no conviction and the escape from justice

of the murderer of a child (who may or may not have been the accused: the way he

was interrogated made the line between truth and conjecture indiscernible). GeorgeHerons confession was the product of interrogators who used techniques familiar

in the United Statesidentification of a good suspect, followed by pressure, misrep-

resentation of witness evidence, and the offering of culpability-reducing themes.

However, the prosecution did not make it past the legal first base of a Crown Court

trial: the confession was excluded, and the case collapsed. Heron was released to a life

of hiding from the family of his alleged victim.

Largely overlooked by lawyers because it did not reach their notice via an appeal

court report, how then did a failure by a provincial police force have such an impact on

policing? The answer lies in two factors. First,Heronfocused attention on investigativefailure rather than on miscarriage of justice: police were forced to understand that they

could not expect to have suspects convicted if they continued to interrogate suspects

in the way that Heron was questioned. Secondly, there was an influential internal report



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Dixon 433

reviewing the case which included the participation of Tom Williamson, a senior police

officer who became the key figure in the development of a new model of interrogation

(Williamson, 1993, 2006). The clear lesson of the Cardiff 3andHeroncases was that

police had to develop new methods of interrogating suspects: the result was the officialendorsement and widespread adoption of investigative interviewing.

b. The United States Response to Miscarriages

Appalling as the miscarriages of justice and investigative failures in England and Wales

were, they are overshadowed by what happened in the United States. Researchers and

activists associated with the Innocence Project and its off-shoots have raised major

concerns about the integrity of the U.S. criminal justice process by proving that scores

of Americans were sentenced to death for crimes that they did not commit. More thanone in five of those exonerated by DNA had confessed to the crime of which they were

wrongly convicted (Gross, 2008; Scheck, Neufeld, & Dwyer, 2000). If they were saved

from execution by positive proof of innocence, the conclusion is unavoidable that some

innocent people were executed after making false confessions (and many, many more

will have been given noncapital sentences for all sorts of alleged crimes). One might

have expected a liberal-democratic society to treat wrongful incarceration and potential

execution of the innocent as a national disgrace requiring a concerted, fundamental

response. Yet this has not happened.

The American criminal justice process has clung to the assumption that miscar-riages of justice are rare and that if they do occur in the context of interrogation, it

is because the suspect was particularly vulnerable through youth or intellectual dis-

ability. Researchers and activists such as Richard Leo have to continue to make the

case that this is not so (Leo, 2001, 2008). Yet the continuing problems which Ameri-

can jurisdictions are having in coming to terms with the evidence that many people

have been wrongly convicted are surely due at least in part to this fundamental mis-

understanding of how cases miscarry. As research into the impact of Miranda and

subsequent Supreme Court cases has shown, suspects rights remain more significant

as rhetoric than as substance (Leo, 2008).When, under pressure to respond to demonstrated miscarriages of justice, it is

accepted that reform is needed, a characteristic response in the United States has been

to over-rely on one regulatory toolelectronic recording. In the United States, calls for

comprehensive recording have become almost de rigeur in recent articles (see Lassiter,

Meissner, Ware, Lindberg, & Ratcliff, 2010; Sullivan, 2010). Not only is the call for

electronic recording ubiquitous, it is virtually the only substantial reform which is pro-

posed. This narrowness is parochial in two ways. First, American writers pay little

attention to the broader processes of regulation which have reformed the criminal process

in England and Wales. Secondly, the repeated advocacy of electronic recording ignoresthe long experience of Australian jurisdictions which have been using audio-visual

recording for almost two decades, not just in field trials, research experiments or selected

cases, but routinely for questioning about all indictable offences. The Australian



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Dixon 435

the public. The idea that interrogation should be recorded is simple and comprehensible,

fitting with common experience of recording images in many settings, including security

surveillance. It is much easier to explain than a complex process of regulating arrest,

custody and interrogation.

Contrasting Understanding of Interrogation

While there has been much criticism of the Reid Technique by Richard Leo and his

colleagues (e.g., Drizin & Leo, 2004; Leo, 2008), there is substantial shared ground

between them regarding the nature of the interrogation process. Both Inbau & Reid

and their critics assume that interrogations are conflictual and that suspects resist pres-

sure to confess:

Why do suspects confess? The short answer, of course, is police interrogation,

since suspects almost never confess spontaneously but virtually always in response

to police pressure. (Leo, 2008, p. 162)

As noted above, a vital finding of the extensive empirical research in England,

Wales and Australia on interrogation is that many suspects do not resist and that con-

fessions are given without the need for overt coercion or psychological pressure. If

this is correct, it would suggest that there are much greater differences between the

American and the English (and Australian) justice processes than previously thought.However, there appears to be no convincing evidence that this is the case: similar

structural pressures for cooperation and nonconflictual settlement characterise both

systems:

the coercive social environment in which interviews take place, the physical iso-

lation of suspects, the pressures that might have been exerted before the recorder

was turned on, the possibility of caution rather than prosecution, the existence of

the discount in sentencing for those who plead guilty, or advice received from

lawyers (Baldwin, 1993, p. 332).

Indeed, bargaining (over pleas, charges and sentences) is even more structured into

the American system than its comparators. It is hard, therefore, to avoid the conclu-

sion that the American interrogation literature does not tell the full story. Inbau & Reid

and the authors of other training manuals have no more incentive to de-emphasise the

conflictual elements of interrogation than a dietician has to say the way to lose weight

is simply to eat less. On the other side of the critical fence, there is remarkably little

empirical research. A factor which seems inexplicable is the dearth of field-based,

empirical research on U.S. police interrogation. So much talent, so many resources ... somany case-focused law journal articles and psychological experiments on students, and

so few sociological or criminological fieldwork studies. In this virtual empirical vacuum,

Richard Leos research, published in many articles and in his monograph Police



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Interrogation and Criminal Justice(2008) is the exception and a constant point of

reference.

Leo presents the work as a comprehensive study of police interrogation in America

(2008, p.5). It is perhaps better read as a study of how noncompliant suspects in seriouscases1are questioned by detectives. The last point is significant: all Leos interrogators

were detectives (and all apparently men), so we are left to wonder about the role of

uniformed officers (and female detectives) in questioning suspects. Leos paints a pic-

ture of detectives characterised by one-sided scepticism, conviction psychology, and

game approach to interrogation who are motivated by a means-end rationality in the

interrogation room (2008, p. 23) and for whom interrogation is a strategic, multistage,

goal-directed, stress-driven exercise in persuasion and deception (2008, p. 119). This is

an example of what I have described elsewhere above as an over-socialised account

of police work (Dixon, 1997, p. 161). The empirical base for his book is observation ofmore than one hundred interrogations inside the Criminal Investigation Division of

the Oakland Police Department, as well as sixty videotaped interrogations by two other

police departments, followed by several hundred more electronically recorded inter-

rogations by American police departments across the United States (2008, p. 5). Given

that electronic recording in the United States has, until recently been reserved for very

serious cases (and has usually been the recording of a rehearsed confession), it seems

likely that Leos data do not provide the basis for a comprehensive study: this would

need to be of a sample randomly chosen from all interrogations.2Leos account of

American interrogation may be accurate as regards serious, contested cases, but it is nota convincing account of everyday investigative practices in the cases which make up

the bulk of the criminal justice processs workload. I pick Leos book for critical com-

ment not because it is bad: on the contrary it is by a long distance the best book in the

field, providing an excellent account of the rise of modern interrogation and of miscar-

riages of justice. Indeed, it is the only substantial empirical study carried out in the

United States. As Leo notes, though interrogation is central to the study of policing,

the criminal investigation process, and modern detective work..., criminologists and

sociologists have largely ignored it (2008, p. 5). Perhaps if this gaping hole could be

filled, a different perspective on American interrogation would emerge.

Developments in U.S. Interrogation

It would be wrong to exaggerate the distance between policing practices in the United

States and elsewhere. Most obviously, the fact that investigative interviewing is the

approved model in England and Wales does not mean that it is universally applied: as

noted above, Clarke and Milne reported PEACEs impact to be quite limited. No

doubt, Inbau and Reid is still read by some UK police. Secondly, this article has delib-

erately referred to the U.S. model rather than practice. As noted in the precedingsection, our empirically-based knowledge of practice in everyday criminal justice is

remarkably limited and there is no reason to believe that United States is so different

from other jurisdictions.



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Dixon 437

More significantly however, there is growing interest in the United States in alter-

native approaches to interviewing. Notably, perhaps surprisingly, some such interest

has come from those responsible for questioning terrorist suspects.

Since the revelations of how terrorist suspects were treated in Guantanamo Bay,Afghanistan, and the American gulag of secret prisons, there has been much debate

about the definition, morality and legality of torture. There has been less intense dis-

cussion of whether practices such as water-boarding are even effective, necessary or

useful (Borum et al., 2009, p. 117). It is sometimes regarded as unnecessary or dis-

tasteful to go beyond the ethical/legal debate except to repeat the accepted wisdom

that torture produces unreliable information. Recently, this area has been subjected to

valuable expansion and deeper analysis by American officials with operational experi-

ence in questioning terrorist suspects. Their conclusion is that the debate about the

ethics of torture is made virtually redundant for policy purposes by, first, the apprecia-tion that the ticking bomb hypothetical which structures much of the torture debate is

rife with assumptions that run counter to nearly any real-world intelligence inter-

rogation (p. 115) and that noncoercive means are more effective in obtaining infor-

mation from suspects.

Some in the U.S. law enforcement community believe that experience with

detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraqboth positive and

negativegenerally support the effectiveness of rapport-based methods

and reveal the myriad of problems that are associated with more coercive oraggressive tactics (Borum et al., 2009, p. 118).

These experiences led to the development of what is hailed as a new era in U.S.

intelligence interrogation. Almost inevitably it seems, this has been christened with

a grisly neologismeducing information.3The term educewas chosen because

it denotes a drawing out or elicitation of information, specifically information that may

be hidden, unexpressed, or latent (Borum et al., 2009, p. 119). This approach is much

closer to investigative interviewing than to the Reid technique: it is not coincidental

that one of the authors, Michael Geddes, has been an active participant in InternationalInvestigative Interviewing conferences. EI seeks information rather than a confession

not just (as in investigative interviewing) because of the problems in an accusatory

approach but also because the primary objective is to gain actionable intelligence

which can be connected to other information resources (Mackey, 2004) rather than

evidence against the individual suspect. It will be of great interest to see the extent

to which this penetrates the U.S. law enforcement community, not least how Reid &

Associates respond to the potential challenge to their market position.

Conclusion

A call for more research is a trite way to end an article, but in this case it is appropriate.

We know far too little about how the key investigative practice of interrogation and



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interviewing actually works in criminal justice processes around the world. Empirical

research on interrogation is not straightforward: problems of access and ethics are real.

However, here, the spread of electronic recording does present a possible advantage

(Dixon, 2007). If properly implemented, electronic recording provides researchersand others with images of interrogation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interests with respect to their authorship or

the publication of this article.

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council.

Notes

1. Leo qualifies the second quoted statement above with especially to serious crimes (2008,

p. 119), which undercuts the claim to generalisability

2. For an example of how this can be done, see Dixon (2007, chapter 2)

3. Other examples are the redesignation of interrogators as HUMINT (human intelligence)

collectors or educing information professionals (Borum et al., 2009).

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Bio

Professor David Dixonis Dean of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Aus-

tralia. His books include Law in Policing: Legal Regulation and Police Practices (Oxford

University Press, 1997) and Interrogating Images: Audio-visually Recorded Police Questioning

of Suspects (Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2007). His research focuses on how regulation

(legal and otherwise) affects policing practice and has included studies of comparative develop-ments in criminal justice, drug policing, and police reform, as well as interrogation.

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