The past two decades has seen a plethora of papers and academic research conducted on investigative interviews with victims, witnesses and suspected offenders, with a particular focus on questioning techniques and typologies. However, despite this research, there still remain significant discrepancies amongst academic researchers and practitioners over how best to describe types of questions. This article considers the available literature relating to interviews with children and adults from both a psychological and linguistic perspective. In particular, we examine how different types of questions are described, and explore the discrepancies between competing definitions. © 2010, equinox publishing.

The question of question types in police interviews: A review of the literature from a psychological and linguistic perspective

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Covert Speech Acts and their Meaning

The Interrogation of Vulnerable Suspects in the Netherlands: An Exploratory Study

Establishing if a crime occurred and, ultimately, proving guilt can be accomplished in one of three ways: by witness/victim statements, by physical evidence, or by confession (Rossmo, 2009). The successful interviewing of suspects, victims, and witnesses is therefore of great importance. Until recently, no scientific knowledge was available to provide guidance for those responsible for conducting police interviews. This is particularly striking when it comes to sex offense perpetrators who are considered less likely to cooperate and confess during police interrogation. However, in the past two decades or so, some pioneering researchers started to empirically study this crucial topic in real world settings, in order to provide police interviewers with evidence-based advice and knowledge about victim, witness, and suspect interviewing in sex offense cases. This chapter reviews current empirical efforts in the field of investigative interviewing with suspects generally, and then focuses specifically on investigative interviewing with sex offense perpetrators.

Suspect Interviews and Confessions in Sex Crime Cases

Controlled studies have demonstrated that guilt-presumptive questions usually accompany interviewer guilt bias and accusatory behaviours towards a suspect. When evaluating police-suspect interviews, however, conventional methods primarily focus on the appropriateness of questions, and guilt-presumption is not featured as a questioning strategy. Instead, guilt-presumptive utterances are aggregated with other types of inappropriate opinion statements. There is often more happening within an interview than is immediately identifiable by simply focusing on question types. Examining the interactivity and behaviours that lead to accusations can reveal subtleties that have a profound influence on the flow and outcome of the interview. To demonstrate this, we analysed six interviews from a single Dutch murder investigation for guilt-presumptive language (accusations and insinuations of guilt) and question appropriateness. We then analysed the police-suspect interactions within the interview that occurred prior to, and immediately after the guilt-presumptive language was used. The findings demonstrated that accusations prompted suspect denials, facilitated a drastic decline in suspect cooperation, and impeded the ability for interviewers to gain investigation relevant information (IRI). We argue that more applied research on guilt-presumptive language is needed in the investigative interviewing literature, particularly in the context of biased decision-making regarding questioning strategies.

van, Koppen, P

Papers

Detecting Guilt Presumption in a Police-Suspect Interview: An Evaluation of the Questions in a Dutch Murder Case