Social scientists have studied law enforcement techniques for a number of years and the law enforcement literature has dispelled many myths about police interrogation practices. The research has also helped to highlight more reliable and efficacious techniques. And while the goal of counterterrorism and military interrogations differ from those in law enforcement, military techniques and those of other agencies are based in part on a law enforcement model and personnel may be subject to the same myths that affect police interrogators.
Investigators, police officers and/or detectives routinely interrogate people suspected of committing crimes. Research has examined procedures used by law enforcement, the perspectives of investigators conducting an interrogation, (for example confidence that the person they are interrogating is the perpetrator), police officers’ ability to detect truth from non-truth, and the psychology and state of mind of the person under interrogation. Literature also exists about the impact of “confession” evidence on prosecutors, judges, and juries. Sources for studying police interrogation techniques have included both archival or real-life material and experiments. There are also training manuals including Criminal Interrogations and Confessions (Inbau, Reid, Buckley and Jayne, 2001) which features the Reid Technique. Hundreds of thousands of police officers have trained in the
Reid Technique.
Research into the psychology of interrogations shows that seasoned investigators assume deception in the target of an investigation, disbelieve people who assert their innocence, are prone to false positives, and yet, are highly confident in their assessments of guilt or innocence. They also tend to believe that the focus of their investigation is "guilty" despite protestations to the contrary. Police investigators often isolate a suspect, confront him or her with evidence of guilt, try to build rapport, and highlight contradictions in a suspect's statements.
American criminal law permits use of the ruse, to which teenagers and the mentally disabled are especially susceptible. These law enforcement strategies can push vulnerable and impressionable suspects to internalize belief in their culpability and cause them to “confess” to crimes they did not commit. The case of the "
Central Park jogger," which resulted in 5 false confessions, is a notorious example of this phenomenon. There is also significant anecdotal evidence, drawn from well-known and sometimes sensational cases, where graphic, detailed “confessions” were later proved false. One quarter of the wrongful convictions uncovered by the
Innocence Project were based on or included false confessions.
Saul Kassin has long researched why suspects confess to crimes they did not commit. Kassin, who reviewed the Central Park jogger case for ABC News, has also demonstrated that even well-trained law enforcement investigators are unreliable in judging the truth or falsity of suspects’ statements. In 2006, Dr. Kassin published the first self-report study of best practices in police interrogation. One of the highlights of the study was that the police investigators surveyed remain overconfident in their ability to detect deception.
Does the law enforcement research apply to interrogations in the military context? It is unclear. Despite the fact that military and law enforcement interrogations are generally conducted with different goals, there may be some applicability. For example, are military interrogators overconfident in their ability to detect deception? How good are they at detecting deception? These questions need to be answered.
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