SKN

Hello hello everyone, this is Susanne Knabe-Nicol from Police Science Dr, and today I'm doing an interview with Tony Paixão from the USA, he's got a background in investigative interviewing and obviously that's something that I'm quite interested in. We have previously spoken together the other way around, where he and his uh his partner interviewed me for their podcast ‘Tell me more about’ and we decided to also flip the script a little bit and I'm going to be interviewing him now and we're going to talk about investigative interviewing and suspect interviewing, the evidence base behind, or the lack of an evidence based behind certain techniques and the way forward. So, welcome Tony Paixão, and again please pronounce it properly now just so we know how it's done?

TP

Yeah yeah, Paixão it sounded pretty darn good. I had a hard time with your last name as well so I think that's just karma yeah.

SKN

And I'm not doing it in retaliation, I do really make an effort and I appreciate your effort. Why don't you give us a little bit of a background, give us a rundown maybe of your CV professionally and educationally?

TP

Sure, so first off thank you for having me on, this is great, I appreciate the time you spent on our podcast as well. So, my background currently I'm working for a company called Verensics, it is a behavioural due diligence screening. So, it's like an AI-powered questionnaire that provides a risk assessment for our clients. A little bit of a of a variation from what I've spent most of my career doing, but still has a lot of tethers in the same space which has been a lot of fun. I just started a doctoral program for clinical psychology, I just completed week one for that, it's all in-person, which has been, you know, being a student after 15 years of not being an in-person student has been quite a turn of events as well all for the good though it's been fun so far. Previous, and while you're talking to me, I came off of five years with an organisation where I helped develop content and curriculum around evidence-based investigative interviewing techniques. That was for law enforcement and for the private sector, whether that's for suspect interviewing which is I know what you want to focus most of this conversation around, or around interviewing victims or witnesses or just exploratory field interviews. There was a large variation of the different kind of modalities that I spent my time either researching or researching and turning that into formal instruction within that role. Prior to that I was in the private sector, I worked for a retail organisation doing what's considered loss prevention or asset protection investigations, and then before that I was in federal law enforcement. I was a special agent with NCIS and then local law enforcement right out of college, so kind of worn a lot of the hats in the investigations / criminal justice space so far into my career.

SKN

Excellent, well you say NCIS, I've watched the program, I've watched one of them, I think there's quite a few of them but that definitely rings a bell. Really good portfolio of experience and qualification there really as well. And you also spent some time as an interview trainer, can you talk us through that a little bit?

TP

My time previous to the role I'm in right now, it was in either the curriculum side of things or, really a lot of my the time spent in that role was doing training, instruction classes for public sector and private sector investigative interviewing techniques. That role was interesting in that it gave me a lot of opportunity to, stay in the know of like what investigators in the States are actually involved with and what they're dealing with from a challenges perspective, but also be able to challenge some of the very much instilled ways of how things have traditionally been done from an investigative interviewing perspective here in the United States and provide them with a different perspective on how to move forward. That's a lot of what I know you and I had talked about that kind of started the interest in having this conversation is changing from “We do it this way because we've always done it this way”, to informing and educating people to be able to articulate why are they strategising these conversations and techniques the way that they are and making sure that their answer there is always based in “Because it is proven to be effective”. Having that kind of evidence-based research supported motivation for how we're having these conversations versus relying on the anecdotal experience that's been tradition primarily in the United States for so many decades.

SKN

Obviously, being evidence-based is extremely important with this because investigative interviews are so crucial both with victims and witnesses because that's where we get the primary information from of what happened, and then with the suspect because that's their opportunity to give us their side of the story and obviously, they may well be completely innocent or partially innocent. You mentioned something earlier I wanted to pick up on, you mentioned explorative field interviews, so I wanted to ask what that is but also, I want to get into a little bit more of – well, let's do that first and then I'll ask you about interviewing in the US so what you mention explorative field interviews what are these?

TP

Exploratory conversations, discovery conversations, field interviewing, it's all kind of different words for the same type of approach and that's generally done at the at the early stages of an investigation when you don't necessarily have any directive other than gathering information and intel. So, you're going in and it's a way to maximise the amount and quality of information you're getting from people that is not focused on any particular objective. So it's not focused on “I'm going in believing that this individual may have been involved in XY o Z incident”, it's not going in with information of “I believe that this person is a witness or a victim” - it's having generalised field conversations just to gather kind of the early stages of intel in a conversation, so that's what I mean by that.

SKN

Getting as much information as possible perhaps without it necessarily being evidential, is that what you mean or without assigning any kind of role to the person you're speaking to?

TP

Yeah it's not knowing necessarily everybody's role or the quality or calibre of information that you're necessarily going to have until you get it, but it's going in and having what I would consider more informal, unstructured conversations. So, it may be conversations and this is where the term ‘field interviewing’ comes from, like a police officer talking to members of the public who maybe just were in the vicinity of an area that something took place in and actually having those conversations with them on site, so in public taking notes as the conversation is unfolding, those types of more impromptu type interactions where you're collecting intel in a less structured format, that's all that refers to.

SKN

Okay yeah makes sense. And now getting to the point of what investigative interviewing is like in the US, obviously we know that the Reid technique was very much spread and common throughout the US, which is quite effective at getting confessions, but unfortunately a lot of these confessions are actually wrong. And I don't actually have a very good overview of how common and widespread that is now and I know it's in decline because it's been shown very, very clearly that the Reid approach is not based on evidence, it’s not actually effective in getting true disclosures, but who still uses it, why do they still use it when there's evidence against it, and what is currently happening in the investigative interviewing field in the States?

TP

Well, first off, unfortunately I think the statement of ‘It's not as it's not as common and a lot of people aren't using the Reid technique’, I don't know how true that statement really is, I think the conversation is definitely starting to turn and it's turning in a very aggressive way, more so than it was five years ago but there are still - I would venture a guess the majority of law enforcement in the United States are still using either the Reid technique or a variation of it. What I mean by that is any type of investigative interview or interrogation technique that is rooted by the objective being getting an admission or gaining a confession. Outside of it not it not being evidence-based and supported by current research, the biggest hang-up with that approach is you're conditioning the investigators and the interviewers to go after one particular objective and that objective is to get the person to tell you what you want them to say and that is going to be to confirm that they did X, Y or Z, so that approach is still alive and well in the United States. Why it's alive and well in the United States even though we have the mountains of data and information to challenge the validity of that type of technique is because it has a longstanding reputation, and when you have something that has a reputation that's been used by literally thousands of investigators over decades within a particular space, law enforcement in this conversation, it is a very, very challenging project to get people to change their minds. To get people to acknowledge that maybe my career spent doing this type of approach and this type of interview and the overwhelming success that most investigators have using this technique is not the best way to do it. You got to start with a population of people that's very open-minded to change and then you need to make a very convincing argument for why they need to or why they at least should consider pursuing a different angle, and doing that in a way that's not vilifying the decades of experience that they've had using that particular technique. So, it's kind of a multifaceted approach but I would argue that the most challenging part is just the loyalty that people tend to have to using the Reid technique and variants of it and getting them to recognise there are better ways. And it's not better ways because they're soft, it's not better ways because where the politics are going and the ‘woke media’ and all these other things that people tend to throw out there, it's better ways because this is straight up what evidence supports, it supports getting to the actual information quicker and with higher validity that it's credible, than the ways that have been used for so long in the States.

SKN

Well this is just full of psychology, isn't it, we're talking about change management, we're talking about a culture change, we're talking about giving up on something that maybe makes some officers feel very powerful, because in that specific way of interviewing suspects you've got this power balance, haven’t you where you as the in investigator are definitely in charge, you definitely have control, you've got a certain set path that you're trying to push the suspect down. And letting go of that and having a much more open-minded approach like you say, it's going to be very difficult to accept, and if a confession is what is trained into them to try and achieve rather than ‘Actually, let's find out what's true’, that is very difficult. I know myself when I interviewed suspects after I did my MSc, my Master’s in investigative psychology, so I had read the all the research on interviewing and became really interested in it, and then I was interviewing suspects and I felt that rush and that pull to try and get a confession out of them. And it did boost my ego and even though I had been better informed and I should have known better. So, I completely understand that. I think we really need to change the conversation to ‘Okay, so this might be a short-term boost to your dopamine levels, however you put the wrong person behind bars, how you're going to feel when that comes to light?’ And the innocent person that's been put behind bars is launching a multi-million dollar lawsuit because their life has been destroyed, the future victims of the person that wasn't caught, who should have been caught by a better investigation, may have their lives destroyed - that's not going to feel so great and I don't personally really blame officers for doing things in the way that they've been trained to do them, because they believed, that they were given the best tools available at the time. So, I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done and one challenge you guys have compared to us here in the UK is you've got no overarching one organisation that is correct that has the 18,000 plus law enforcement organisations ‘Hang on guys, we need to introduce a new way of interviewing or we need to introduce a new way of doing XYZ and everybody sticks to that’, we do have that here, we have the National Crime Agency, we have the College of Policing, we have the Home Office, they can set certain guidelines and enforce them and the police will have to follow them. And that is completely different in the States and I think you're really missing such an oversight-having organisation that pulls together the evidence and says ‘Right okay, we need to do this in a uniform, proper way’.

TP

That's such a good point, and there's a few things that you just touched on that I think create a unique kind of situation for the challenges that we're dealing with over here. The first you just touched on, which is lack of direct oversight, so in the United States, there's not anything that says ‘Everybody has to use this type of approach’. What we do have though that I think we're starting to take advantage of in a positive way, is being able to influence the legal system. So, through what the laws are on a state-by-state basis at least is where it's starting, in a addressing the most critical areas that need to be taken off the table as options for law enforcement and private sector really to be able to use within an interview, which would be use of deception in these types of interactions. Asnd right now, we're not having a legitimate conversation about not using deception in any law enforcement interview with any individual. The conversation is isolated to using deception with juveniles, so we're only in the phase right now of convincing state by state by state, the potential shortfalls that come from lying to kids and how that can create challenges with the credibility of the disclosures that are provided. Also, challenges with the ethics that go into those types of interactions if law enforcement is lying about evidence to a minor and then the minor ends up acknowledging or admitting and providing the information that the law enforcement was looking for, you can see where that creates a pretty slippery slope. That seems so obvious, but that even right now is a fight to get those things taken off the table. So, I think we are still a long ways away, but from an optimistic perspective, the conversation is definitely starting to change and I would argue there's a lot of proactive approaches being taken by grassroots organisations in the United States of getting well ahead of what the bare minimum legal standard is for how these interviews can be conducted and recognising evidence-based practices are the way to go. And they're the way to go not just because they're more ethical, they're the way to go because they result in better, more credible statements and disclosures from the individuals that we're talking to.

So, you do have a - I would say a quickly growing population of companies that are now starting and some that have been around for quite some time that are shifting their focus on not ‘How many confessions can I get and how many admissions can I get within those confessions’, but ‘How are we teaching the techniques that we're endorsing and what are they rooted in’ and making sure that those are research-based, evidence-based practices that are aligned with the highest levels of success globally, not just here in the States.

SKN

It's interesting what you're saying about deception and interviews, by that we mean the investigator using deception to get the interviewee to admit to certain things. This is a conversation that we in the UK haven't really had in a few decades because it's just illegal, we're not allowed to lie to a suspect in interview, and I think that is correct and I think that is how it should be. We should have the moral standard of ‘We're going to be honest and we're going to be transparent’, and actually we're getting further with that we're getting better outcomes but also the concept of procedural justice, that if the law enforcement or any organisation in authority is seen as fair, transparent and dealing with situations and people in a just manner, that person that is being dealt with by that authority is more likely to stick to the law in the future. So, if you have a law enforcement organisation that can't be trusted, the citizens are going to be less likely to obey the law. So there's several things where these investigators who use this very old archaic and frankly bad approach to interviewing are shooting themselves in the foot they're losing credibility in front of suspects, again, some, many I have no idea how many are innocent, in front of the wider population because you're not standing morally above criminals if you're also lying and being deceptive in interview. And you're putting the wrong person away just because that was the first person you caught and you thought this would be a nice shortcut to getting your figures up of resolving a case and it just doesn't make sense. It's wrong on a number of levels.

TP

It's all rooted in the same challenge that I introduced at the beginning of this, which is reputation and this loyalty that people have to certain approaches. The idea of using deception - if you talk to somebody that's outside of this space that's never been really interacted with law enforcement community on either side of the fence, whether that's from a suspect perspective, victim, witness, they've been this connected - when you tell someone that the police can lie about evidence that they have against an individual, when you say that to a Joe Public, most of the time they are shocked to learn that information. Because they wouldn't realise that that's an option, and again that goes into the why it can be at least a when I say effective I'm not endorsing it, but it can be an effective approach because most people don't realise that the cops can be dishonest. So, if they hear something they take it for truth. And that's part of the psychological manipulation as to why it was used in the first place, so when we talk about what these techniques that are antiquated that we need to move past at some point hopefully in the very very near future, what they're all rooted in is this concept that the objective is to get this person to tell us what we want them to say. And it goes all it predates the Reid technique. The first problem was physical torture and manipulation which resurfaced after 9/11 and that's a whole another conversation, that we decided as a culture that we did not want to support physical torture or manipulation from law enforcement to general public during interrogations. So, we said we don't want to do that. So, what can we do that we can still kind of get to the same objective of getting this person to talk? And it evolved into psychological manipulation. And those psychological manipulative tactics were the lifeblood tethered into techniques like the Reid technique, these maximisation / minimisation, utilising deception in certain scenarios, creating power imbalances - all of these different things that they tossed into that approach are extremely effective of getting somebody to talk to you. What they are unfortunately not effective of doing is discerning the credibility of the information and disclosures that were actually made during those interactions. So, that's where you run into those problems of yes, you can force someone to say something, but if what they say is not true or it's not rooted in all truth, it has some kind of some mistruths woven into it just to appease the person asking the questions - you create a very, very challenging situation where we have investigations that are being closed with information that cannot be deemed reliable and you also now have a whole ethics issue of ‘How did we get that information in the first place?’ So, this evolution has been a longstanding process of from physical to psychological to what works what actually works. And fortunately, researchers have proven, not myself directly, research has supported ‘Those things don't even work’. So, if they don't work and they're not ethical then this is a win-win situation for evidence-based practices rooted in empathy and rapport, building genuine, effective relationships with the individuals we're trying to get information from that is effective. And it has been proven time and time again. So that's kind of where the ship is righting at this point in time of how do we a) educate the practitioners that have been doing it this other way, and then how do we b) make sure that actually fully get behind and endorse it as realising these are effective approaches much more so than what I was doing in the past. So, it's a multifaceted kind of change management project that the United States has been just working through for a number of years now

SKN

And that's the interesting thing isn't it, you and I we were discussing how bad all these coercive manipulative approaches are and it would sort of be understandable if officers still carried on with that if we didn't know what the alternative was, and if we didn't know what worked, but actually, we do know what works and it has been proven. For example, Professor Laurence Alison from Liverpool University has proven and many others have proven that like you say, building rapport, having an equal relationship, no hierarchy, treating someone with genuine respect and curiosity, giving them autonomy and really being interested in what they have to say, in their experience and supporting them, and making them feel safe in disclosing that, without being judged by the interviewer are effective. And they work at getting suspects to open up about what they have done and they may not have done anything. And it's not just in low-level cases, but Professor Alison showed that this works with terrorism suspects as well. So, we have the solution, we know what works best with any kind of suspects, it just needs to be applied, we just need to get it into the - well if we've got over 18,000 police or law enforcement organisations in the States, we somehow need to get it to them that this works better, it's better for you because you're getting to the right person, it's better for the suspects because they're not being coerced into something that will get them incarcerated for something they haven't done, it's better for future victims because the guilty person is not still out there. This is a no-brainer, just getting that information to them and then getting them trained up in it, that's the challenge and like we said, the change management project.

TP

And that is such a more complex challenge than I think it even sounds as we're talking through it. You mentioned Laurence Alison's work on rapport and being able to actually highlight definitively that establishing these empathy-based interactions and leveraging rapport versus manipulation is a much more effective way to get actionable information, that has been proven time and time again. I think the issue unfortunately that tends to surface and then resurface is demonstrated or highlighted really well with what happened after 9/11. And we're seeing this with all the trials that are coming out of Guantanamo Bay with the enhanced interrogation techniques. When you have research that supports ‘rapport works’ we still have this kind of knee-jerk reaction to revert back to the old ways of doing thing. I call this kind of like the problem with trainers specifically being lukewarm in what they actually believe in and what they're promoting. And what I mean by being lukewarm is when if I'm talking to you about empathy-based strategies, rapport is effective, manipulation is not only ineffective, it's unethical and you have all these other issues and risks that come as a result. But if I'm telling you that on one hand and I'm telling you to use empathy and rapport in general as your approach and your strategy, but then when something actually happens and it reaches a certain threshold of severity and I say ‘Well hey rapport’s fantastic but in this case, with this type of incident, with a terrorist or with a suspect for X Y or Z that's something really really serious, now we got to be serious about this, now we need to revert back to those intimidation factors we need to be aggressive, we need the power imbalance, we need to do all those things.’ It totally negates all of the momentum that we've built on telling people to do these ways in this approach because if we say when things are actually problematic you actually go back to what you were doing before then, which is it? So, so you got to pick a lane and I think that's what we're working with right now at least primarily in the States is practicing what we preach from a trainer's perspective but also from a practitioner standpoint. We're not just saying rapport works because politically that's what we need to be saying. We're saying rapport works because from a research perspective without question, it is significantly more impactful than the alternatives, but we need to stick with that even in the rough scenarios and situations and that actually needs to be the baseline of how we're functioning and maintaining these conversations and not jostling back and forth between you know depending on the severity of the situation or the type of intel that we need.  

SKN

And if we did get the education into the right kind of people and we give that example of ‘The research has been done on terrorism suspects, I don't know if you can think of many more serious offences, even there it works.’ If we don't have this top-down organisation that can tell every law enforcement organisation how they should be doing it, you were talking about grassroots organisations, how do we change the approach to interviewing and who is currently already doing that in the States and what are they doing and how?

TP

As far as how we actually impact change and get organisations to start teaching this I think it's through things like this, I think it's educational. Having the right people hear how effective these strategies are and what the research and evidence actually supports how this plays out in the actual interview room is really critical and then having actual examples, having case studies that show when we've used these techniques, these are the results and the outcomes that we've seen as a result and being able to build on that is really one of the first steps, I think. So, the educational component is important but we need actual case study information to support that what we're saying works, actually works. And Laurence Alison obviously that you mentioned, he has a wealth of data and information right in line with that concept that shows that these strategies are effective on a whole laundry list of individuals, regardless of where on the spectrum of severity the situation falls. From a training perspective, when I mentioned the grassroots, when you think about interview and interrogation in the United States, Reid is the only name that most people have ever heard of, there are now more organisations popping up. The company that I came from, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, they are gaining a significant momentum in the space of interview and interrogation, based on leveraging at least the optics of leaning into evidence-based practices. And now we've also got a number of smaller training organisations not quite of a platform as the Reid in the WZs but a number of what I would consider like Mom and Pop interviewing companies that are gaining significant traction for two reasons. One, they are manned by actual law enforcement agents, whether that's local, state, federal they're either currently still sworn or they're retired, they’re career law enforcement. So they immediately step into those conversations with inherent credibility. And the second reason they're finding success is because they are leveraging evidence-based practices, so they can tether their experience with the research and they can have kind of that practitioner-educator approach that is very, very well-received in training spaces because people believe them from their experience and they believe them from the research that supports the efficacy of the techniques that are being introduced.

SKN

That sounds like it's all from the commercial sector really, serving or former law enforcement officers starting to work for small companies that provide investigative interviewing training. Is that how training in the US is done I mean obviously I know you've got a number of large police departments that might have their own training provision in there, but what about the smaller police departments? Here, we would call a rural police force that has maybe 2,000 officers and 2,000 staff, we would call that a small force or you would call it department, but I think you guys, even a shopping mall can have a police force or a university can have a police force, sometimes you only got a handful of people - where do they get their training from, do they have to buy it in commercially from these companies or are there training centres and how do we influence what's being taught?

TP

Man, gosh, I wish there was an easy way to answer that question but this is what we got into, the fragmentation of expectations and standards in the States is what creates a lot of these challenges to standardise. To directly answer your question about the size and scope of departments, whether it's a sheriff's office or a police department, that can range from you have two people that work there that are sworn that are responsible for the area of responsibility, to thousands. It totally depends. The larger departments honestly, they also vary, Chicago Police Department is a good example. Chicago has a very robust training arm internally within the department, but I also know that they outsource, they hire third-party vendors to come in and provide a lot of the training for various aspects required from a standardisation standpoint to their officers and detectives. Interviewing specifically they may outsource and hire a third-party company to come in and provide that training, whereas a New York Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Memphis, whatever the PD may be, they may have an internal component or structure created within their training of their respective department, so there's not an expectation that says ‘You have to hire outside, and when you hire outside they have to meet these standards’, that doesn't exist right now in the States. It really is kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure depending on where you're going. Now, there are some mandates and further regulation on a state-by-state basis, so some states in my experience from Virginia, they have regional training centres. So, departments kind of coalesce at various regional training centres based on your proximity to that location. When I went through the local police department I was in with six or seven other police and Sheriff's offices, all of us new hires, new recruits going to one central location, all being trained through the standardised process of what the Virginia law enforcement training requirements look like. It wasn't respective of the University of Virginia Police Department, it wasn't the Shannona police department, it was mandated by the state of what people are getting exposed to and where those trainers are coming from. So, there's a lot of different answers to that question which is probably the answer to the question of there's no singular response unfortunately or expectation.

To kind of add on to that just real quickly, I think there have been some good efforts made though to provide access to evidence-based training to the more rural departments that don't necessarily have the resources to staff an internal training or the resources honestly to pay for a third-party vendor to come in and provide training. The Cops Office is a good example of this in the United States. It's a federal project where they provide training that is evidence-based at least as far as I know, everything that they provide, and they provide it at no cost to rural police departments so that they can at least have some level of exposure to what works and what doesn't. And this is in line with investigative interview training specifically, so there are ways for organisations to get their hands on the right stuff, it just depends on a) who's tasked with looking and b) what the resources are at their disposal for how much they can spend and what that requirement looks like.

SKN

That all sounds very much in need of some kind of overhaul and standardisation and some kind of top-down approach really. How do you see the landscape evolving in the States in the next few years, and how does that compare to other countries from what you know?

TP

I think where it's going to continue on the same trajectory that it's currently on. I touched on this not necessarily idea, but this strategy that's being taken of making an impact from a legislative perspective. So, targeting the most critical areas of the anecdotal old school interrogation, accusatory style techniques, isolating the most critical areas of risk that are in those approaches and going from a legislative perspective to have those techniques not necessarily the brand, but some of the ingredients that make the brand, so use of deception, use of mitigation and maximisation techniques, those types of things, having those being taken off the table as options, because they are made illegal to do. And again, that's a long road unfortunately to haul because the struggle right now is even just convincing people that we shouldn't be lying to kids. Which seems so obvious, so let's take that off the table first, and then hopefully maybe that will evolve into scenarios of not lying and using deception to adults in certain aspects or types of conversations. And again, that snowball hopefully will continue to gain and build momentum. So that at least we may not have a standardised ‘You have to use this technique like P.E.A.C.E., or this approach or framework’ but at least all of the techniques that are used for training in the United States, they have to at least meet these minimum standards and those standards hopefully will be supported by research and evidence-based approaches. I think that is where it's going, it's just getting more people on board to continue to fight that fight and push for that and more organisations that are being created.

But getting organisations to buy into that ‘Not only are the standards saying I should be going after this type of approach, but because I've gone through the training I've used it and I've seen how effective it can be’. You have training organisations and training arms within agencies that are proactively seeking out that type of educational experience, I think that'll continue to hopefully right the ship and get us in the spot where we're hoping to be.

SKN

Okay, so lots of work to be done. You mentioned P.E.A.C.E. there for those that don't know, P.E.A.C.E. stands for a specific interviewing approach that has been the norm here and required and obligatory in the UK. It stands for plan and prepare, engage and explain, account / get the account from the person, challenge or clarify and evaluate at the end. So, in 1991/ ‘92 this was made mandatory and all police officers who are trained in suspect interviewing are trained on the P.E.A.C.E. model, and the P.E.A.C.E. model has been exported, it's getting trained to others around the world. I know that some offices in the US are already trained on it, the training is around, but like you said it's up to the state perhaps or whoever is deciding what training to bring into the department to decide ‘Okay well he's a company offering Reid retraining, I've heard from that company for 20 years um here's this other company -  P.E.A.C.E.? What's that all about? Well let's go with what I know’. It seems like very hap-hazard process but I guess you are on your way you know like you said there's more and more companies offering these alternative training routes. I guess we somehow need to get hold of those decision-makers and really get them on board and get them educated so that they can then decide to educate all the offices and the correct ways of and the best most effective ways of doing it in the interest of law enforcement, in the interest of all the population.

TP

P.E.A.C.E. is a great example because it's probably the most common known outside of the United States and it is gaining a lot of traction in the US as well, P.E.A.C.E. is not an interview technique so like when we talk about Reid or WZ in in the United States, WZ has multiple techniques built into the kind of the suite or portfolio of options that are offered. WZ technique just being one of many. The Reid technique is a step-by-step, you got to follow this very highly structured approach to execute the conversation.

P.E.A.C.E. is a framework or a model like you said, so it's really just providing the investigator with a general outline or a blueprint of here's how this conversation really should be organised, here are main points that you need to make sure that you focus and touch on as you evolve through the discussion, which is why it's so effective and it's also evidence-based. So, you guys over in the UK at least, P.E.A.C.E. came to be based on a lot of the problems that are kind of stimulating this need for change in the States: false confessions. There were some major high-profile false confessions in the late 80s and you know PACE turned to P.E.A.C.E. and then now we have this framework that is not without its own problems but it's at least a framework that is built on research and has garnered the support at the highest levels. So, I think in the States as we're starting to evolve towards that, it is helpful to have to have examples of other countries and agencies that have already made a lot of these inroads seen success, seen failures and adjusted as a result so that we can kind of start where they're leaving off without having to recreate the wheel. So, in that aspect I guess I'm a little optimistic that we don't have to start from nothing but there's definitely a lot of growth to be had that we're moving towards.

SKN

Let's put it optimistically: there is lot of room for improvement, which in a way is great because, whenever you can improve something that's an opportunity that should be taken.

As my last question to you - if you could wave a magic wand and you could make one change in policing, in law enforcement, in investigative interviewing, what would that be?

TP

Geez that's a great question. I guess if I'll focus the answer strictly on investigative interviewing it would be that there was a universal standard of what should be used, or frameworks that should be used or relied on when it comes to the training component. And then obviously the execution and the practical interviewing that's taking place across the various agencies, local, state and federal in the United States. So, a standardisation that relies on the evolving evidence-based practices that are currently out there. That would be my top wish of being able to standardise it and then that standardisation being informed by the evolving standards of what evidence-based research actually looks like in this space.

SKN

I think that would be a great change, and I'm fully behind that and if I can assist in any way let me know how and I will do so.

TP

Definitely will. I do have one quick thing I wanted to add and I think this is really important. When we talk about investigative interviewing, interrogation training, and I can only speak to in the United States specifically, but a lot of times this comes from a position of almost sounding like vilifying the practitioner. Vilifying law enforcement or coming about it from an approach of you know cops are just going in there, they don't care if the answer they're getting is true or not, they just wanted admission, they wanted confession, I genuinely do not believe that to be the case. I will acknowledge as with any profession, that there are bad apples and there are people that are motivated by motivations, nefarious motivations, whatever it may be, but the overwhelming majority of people in the public sector law enforcement space in the States are motivated by a sense to give back by public service. And they want to do the right thing. This is getting back to what you had said earlier, not faulting the practitioner for being taught something that they should have never been taught in the first place, but really faulting the expectations of the training organisations of why are they not holding themselves to higher standards and teaching what is supported by evidence and research and what actually works in the field. I just think it's an important distinction of not to put the blame on the actual practitioner, the cops, the detectives entirely in this scenario but really holding the training organisations under the fire of what are your expectations for validating what's being taught and how are you making sure that you're living up to and exceeding those expectations so you're providing the client, the cops, the police with the best product possible so that we can kind of avoid a lot of these problems that we're seeing unfolding in the field. When you utilise these less than ideal techniques.

SKN

 I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a video on YouTube of an actual interrogation from the States of a 14-year-old boy who was accused of burglary and it's an extremely oppressive interview, he was sitting in the interview room for I think for seven hours and he's physically being cornered and he's being lied to and it's absolutely horrific to watch. I show this to my students in class when I teach on the criminology program and the video continues with the Chief of Police being interviewed and he says well it's not a misconduct issue, it's a training issue. And he is making a few excuses, but I do say to my students that actually I agree with that - if that is how this person has been trained to do things, if that is how the others do it, it's very very very difficult for one person to say, actually no this this is not right, it should be done differently. Because a) how would they know secondly, peer pressure is very strong, police culture is very strong, unless somebody knows that this is the wrong way of doing it, and unless they have the authority to say ‘This is not how I'm doing it because it's wrong’, it's really difficult to go against that. So, no, I don't blame the practitioners who are doing it as they've been trained, I blame the training. But again the people who have commissioned the training don't know any better either. And we're coming back to this whole change management and the educational process where everything needs to start and this top-down approach, the standardisation that you were talking about

TP

It's one of the most frustrating things to watch a documentary and see an interrogation done whether it's on a juvenile, an adult with diminished cognitive capacity or whatever the scenario may be, even if it's just a normal person going in that you would never guess could be subjected to providing false confession or false information. There's a kind of a varying spectrum there, but it's really frustrating when you watch the interrogation and as the consumer, the person watching it, you're getting so infuriated by ‘Why are they doing this, why is the cop treating this person like this, with no respect, why are they talking down to them, being demeaning, being aggressive, why are they doing all these things?’ It's really hard to watch and then, if the documentary is about where you know the outcome, and the outcome is this person provided a false confession it's even more frustrating, because you know what's happening is putting this victim which it would be a victim, in a position where they gave information because they felt like they had no other choice, they were tricked or whatever else - in those scenarios when you're watching that there's so many compounding levels of frustration, it's watching the actual interrogation and then oftentimes what happens is the documentary will have a conversation with the detective. And the detective in most scenarios in those types of entertainment, in those scenarios the detective is doubling down on what they did so they're saying ‘I know that this person was guilty, I believe what I did was right’ whatever whatever whatever - and it's creating this really negative image of the police and of their intentions and motivations. I think a lot of times if you want to get somebody to be open to change, you can't come about attacking them and what they're doing in a way that is confrontational. It's the irony of this problem. A lot of times when you're trying to talk to the practitioners and get them to be open-minded to doing this in a different way, the way that so many people go about doing it is utilising some of the same techniques that we’re telling the cops they shouldn't be using: being aggressive, challenging them, shooting them down, having this power imbalance. Instead of being open-minded, trying to get to understand why are they doing it this way in the first place? And let's reinforce positively the things that they're doing that are working and that are effective and let's educate them by their own words on why some of these other variables and components are not working and they're ineffective. So that we can actually orchestrate some real change versus having some of these reactionary just pitting fights against one another which I think, unfortunately is more common than not.

SKN

Exactly. Any last words be before we finish off for today, Tony?

TP

No, I appreciate taking some time to have a conversation, this is great I love talking about this topic and I'm excited to see all of the information that you're putting out there on this to continue to educate people. That's really the biggest part of this battle, getting the right information in front of the right people, so thanks for having me on.



SKN

Thank you very much for coming. Tony Paixão, thanks for your time.