Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

educed the scope of coercive questioning and barred the use of deception, trickery,
and psychological manipulation in interrogation. 592
Currently, Britain has a set of national guidelines on interviewing both
witnesses and suspects, composed of five distinct parts (corresponding to the
acronym “PEACE”):
Preparation and Planning: Interviewers are taught to properly prepare
and plan for the interview and formulate aims and objectives.
Engage and Explain: Rapport is established with the subject, and officers
engage the person in conversation.
Account: Officers are taught two methods of eliciting an account from
the interviewee:
• Cognitive Interview: used with cooperative suspects and witnesses.
• Conversation Management: recommended when cooperation is
insufficient for the cognitive interview techniques to work.
Closure: The officer summarizes the main points from the interview and
provides the suspect with the opportunity to correct or add information.
Evaluate: Once the interview is finished, the information gathered must
be evaluated in the context of its impact on the investigation. 593
The PEACE approach was based on the idea of providing officers with an
ethical foundation for police questioning. 594 It focuses on information gathering
rather than obtaining confessions, and it relies on non-coercive interviewing
and accurate recording of the interview to achieve its goals. 595 Officers adopting
“oppressive” questioning would be in breach of the national guidelines, and would
presumably find judges less willing to admit into evidence statements obtained
through those means. 596
It is useful to note that an overwhelming proportion of scholarship and
research on interrogation comes from Great Britain. This is mostly because PACE
requires that all interrogations conducted in Great Britain be video-recorded.
These recordings, in turn, allow for more research and study opportunities.
Detective Superintendent Colin Sturgeon: A Practitioner’s Perspective 597
Detective Superintendent Sturgeon of the Police Service of Northern Ireland
has vast experience with interrogations both in typical law enforcement and
terrorism-related investigations. During our conversation, he offered a historical
592
Id.
593
Id., p. 53.
594
Id.
595
Id., p. 54.
596
Id.
597
The information in this section is derived from a discussion with Detective Superintendent
Colin Sturgeon of the Police Service of Northern Ireland during his spring 2005 visit to Harvard Law
School.
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