Journal of Contemporary Criminal

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Questioning Suspects: A Comparative Perspective

David Dixon
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 2010 26: 426
DOI: 10.1177/1043986210377107
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Articles

Questioning Suspects:
A Comparative Perspective

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

26(4) 426440
2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1043986210377107
http://ccj.sagepub.com

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 police
officers via the Reid Technique and similar U.S. training programs and the strategy of
investigative interviewing in England and Wales (and increasingly elsewhere in Europe
and Australasia). This policy divergence must be understood in the context of differing
responses to miscarriages of justice and investigative failures (caused, at least in part,
by inefficient interrogation techniques) and the knowledge which inquiries into these
miscarriages and failures produced. While investigative interviewing is part of a response
to 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 problem
which has not only convicted (and executed) the innocent, but also failed to bring
the guilty to justice. Drawing on empirical research in Australia, where audio-visual
recording has been used routinely since the early 1990s, the article notes the limits and
benefits of electronic recording, which too often is presented as a panacea. The article
notes that most discussion of American interrogation takes place in an empirical vacuum
and expresses doubts about the prevalent accounts of police practice. It also notes
some recent interest in the United States in alternative approaches to interrogating
suspects 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,
1

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Corresponding Author:
David Dixon, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Email: d.dixon@unsw.edu.au

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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 contrast must be understood in the context of differing responses to miscarriages of
justice 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 convergence (Jones & Newburn, 2007), interrogation bucks the trend, with notable differences 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 investigation and questioning, accusatory interrogation techniques are used to draw out a
confession. The suspect may resist, but the expertise of the police detective leads him
or 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 interrogation 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 Leo
has 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 interrogation 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 interviewing 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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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 investigations 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 confirmed, 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 suggesting 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 the
suspects 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 operational
capacity. 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 peculiar 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 the
reliability of such confessions cannot be guaranteed: as will be shown below, the recognition of miscarriages of justice and investigative failures have made this a major
concern.

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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 New
Zealand 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 evaluation. 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 justification
of 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 challenged the belief that police questioning of suspects involves tense difficult encounters in which suspects resist and have to be coerced into confession. On the contrary,
UK researchers found that most interviews involve relatively simple and straightforward 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 Australia
produced similar findings (Dixon, 2007).
The investigative interviewing model therefore assumes that nonconflictual interaction 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 noncooperative 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 the
skill necessary to break down resistant suspects (which includes dominating the suspect
through isolation and behavioural control), the investigative interviewing model downgrades 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 exponents 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 characteristics 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 carefully. An early official appraisal of investigative interviewing was positive (McGurk,
Carr, & McGurk, 1993), but a much more critical assessment was provided by Clarke
and 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 significant 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 those
conducted 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 pervasive misconduct and incompetence found earlier by earlier researchers. A significant lesson to learn from Clarke and Milnes review is that it is difficult to separate any
specific impact of investigative interviewing from the broader process of change in
British policing which, as will be shown below, flowed from recognition of miscarriages and failures.

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PEACE is more important for its impact in undermining previously accepted strategies
than for the specific techniques of information gathering and checking which it incorporates. 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 common
experience 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 of
justice and investigative failures must be understood.
The starting point must be recognition that miscarriages of justice and investigative 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 unintentional leaking of information to suspects can produce unreliable confessions, particularly (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 belief
that 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 through
a 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 justice. While domestic commentators (e.g., Sanders & Young, 2003) stress the continuing
problems of criminal justice in the United Kingdom, what is striking from an international 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; crucial
advances 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 from
many perspectives increasing it). The Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure of
1978-1981 led to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which introduced wideranging protections for suspects, including time-limited detention before charge, contemporaneous (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 police
effectiveness was not reduced. On the contrary, the general response of police was retrospectively 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 making the police realise that change was needed (and that if they did not change themselves, that change would be imposed). First, in the Cardiff 3 case (Dixon, 1997,
pp. 171-172), the Court of Appeal delivered damning criticism of police practices in
interrogating suspects. As had been happened in the Confait case 20 years before,
subsequent disclosures caused even more problems for the police: Sekars relentless
investigative 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 investigation which led to a prosecution which collapsed around the exclusion from evidence 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). George
Herons confession was the product of interrogators who used techniques familiar
in the United Statesidentification of a good suspect, followed by pressure, misrepresentation 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, Heron focused attention on investigative
failure 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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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 3 and Heron cases was that
police had to develop new methods of interrogating suspects: the result was the official
endorsement 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 than
one 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 miscarriages 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 disability. 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 American 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 misunderstanding 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 proposed. 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 ignores
the 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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experience provides important guidance for other jurisdictions considering the routine,
compulsory audio-visual recording of police questioning of suspects (Drizin, Leo, &
Reich, 2004; Kassin, Drizin, Grisso, Gudjonsson, Leo, & Redlich, 2009).
The key findings of my empirical research on electronic recording (Dixon, 2006,
2007) are that the concerns usually expressed about electronic recording have not been
substantiated. The interrogators job has not become impossible: suspects continue to
make confessions and admissions. As seems typical, police opinion has shifted from
antagonism and scepticism to acceptance and enthusiasm. The removal of the taint of
verballing has benefited the criminal justice process, both ideologically by increasing
public confidence and instrumentally by reducing the court time spent on challenges to confessional evidence. However, there are problems of which advocates of
electronic recording need to be aware.
Audio-visual recording may be highly problematic if it is used, as appears common
in the United States, to record only a repeat of a confession made during previously
unrecorded questioning. While audio-visual recording makes simple verballing impossible, inadequate legal regulation of the process means that recorded interviews are
often preceded by unrecorded questioning which may undermine the reliability of any
subsequent recorded confession. Electronic recording could be a major tool of reform
in criminal justice: but it is a secondary tool. It has to rely on extensive regulation of
police investigation which ensures that what is recorded is comprehensive.
Secondly, there is a worrying tendency amongst some criminal justice professionals
(notably judges) to believe that they can use the recorded image to read the suspects
body language. One aspect of interrogation which has benefited from very extensive
psychological research is the detection of deception. Its general conclusion is that the
lie-signs of which so much is made are (a) indications of anxiety which are as likely
to be exhibited by innocent as by guilty suspects; and (b) culturally specific (so, most
obviously, gaze aversion indicates submission to or respect for authority rather than
deception in some cultures). While it is possible that highly trained psychologists may
be able to identify deception at a higher rate, most police, prosecutors, judges and jurors
will do so at a rate little better than chance (Vrij, 2000). These problems are compounded by the influence of the visual image: people believe what they see.
Thirdly, the fact that electronic recording is regarded as a panacea means that other
regulation is regarded as superfluous. Notably in Australia, this has meant that while
some of the structure and terminology of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 have
been imported from England and Wales, there seems at best limited commitment to
import its spirit of substantial change and reform. Just one example will be given
herethe almost complete absence of solicitors from Australian police stations. While
Australian jurisdictions provide various rights of access, these remain hypocritically
empty rights because no funding is provided for legal advice schemes.
Why is there this over-reliance on electronic recording? First, the United Statess
balkanized criminal justice system is much less amenable to centrally approved regulation. It still relies heavily on judicial regulation and evidentiary controls. Secondly,
electronic recording is a relatively easy reform to sell to politicians, policy makers and

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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 pressure 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 confessions 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 isolation 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 conclusion 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 ... so
many 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 serious
cases1 are 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 picture 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 of
more 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 interrogations 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.2 Leos account of
American interrogation may be accurate as regards serious, contested cases, but it is not
a 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 comment 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 miscarriages 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 deliberately referred to the U.S. model rather than practice. As noted in the preceding
section, 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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More significantly however, there is growing interest in the United States in alternative 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 discussion 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 distasteful 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 experience 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 appreciation 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 interrogation (p. 115) and that noncoercive means are more effective in obtaining information 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 or
aggressive 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.3 The term educe was 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 International
Investigative 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 researchers
and 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 Dixon is Dean of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. 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 developments in criminal justice, drug policing, and police reform, as well as interrogation.

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