Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Interrogation in Britain 47
The work of Williamson (1990, 1993, 1994) is particularly important in showing
the growth of professionalism in the questioning of suspects following the
implementation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984, making
it inherently less coercive. Williamson (1990) listened to a large number of
post-PACE audio-recorded police interviews and in addition made a detailed
questionnaire study of 80 police detectives at busy London police stations (see
Williamson, 1990, 1993, for a detailed discussion of the questionnaire study).
From listening to the tapes of interviews Williamson (1990, 1993) identified
four interrogation styles—‘collusive’, ‘counselling’, ‘business-like’ and ‘dominant’.
He placed these four styles against two dimensions—‘evidence orientated’
versus ‘confession orientated’ (horizontal dimension) and ‘cooperative’ versus
‘confrontational’ (vertical dimension). The ‘collusive’ style was characterized by
a cooperative and problem solving approach, aimed at securing a confession.
The ‘counselling’ style was characterized by a cooperative non-judgemental approach,
aimed at securing evidence. The ‘business-like’ style was confrontational
and aimed at securing evidence, whereas the ‘dominant’ style, which
was also confrontational, was aimed at securing a confession. Unfortunately,
the different interviewing styles were not studied in relation to admissions and
denials.
Williamson asked 80 detectives which of the four interviewing styles they
identified with. Twenty-one (26%) officers identified with the ‘collusive’ style,
16 (20%) with the ‘counselling’ style, 11 (14%) with the ‘business-like’ style and
five (6%) with the ‘dominant’ style. A third of the officers did not appear to
be able to identify with any one particular technique. When asked which style
they thought was most unsatisfactory just over half indicated that it was the
‘dominant’ style.
It would have been interesting to match the officers’ self-reported style with
those identified from Williamson’s own ratings of the tape-recorded interviews.
It appears that the officers who completed the questionnaire did not conduct the
tape-recorded interviews, which Williamson analysed. We simply do not know
whether the officers were accurate in rating their own style of interviewing.
Interestingly, when asked to identify the main purpose of an interview, only
12% of the officers said it was ‘to obtain a confession’, whereas 38% and 24% said
it was ‘to get to the truth’ and ‘to seek an explanation’, respectively. When asked
to rank order their preferred method of recording an interview 61% said videorecording,
33% preferred audio-recording, 5% preferred making notes after an
interview and 1% ranked contemporaneous note-taking. This finding suggests
that the great majority of officers prefer electronic recording to manual notetaking,
which is reassuring in view of the mandatory use by police in England
and Wales of tape-recorded interrogations.
Sear and Stephenson (1997) examined the relationship between the personality
of police officers and their interviewing performance. Nineteen police
officers completed a personality questionnaire measuring Dominance, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness. Four interview tapes
were rated for each officer in terms of 13 skill factors considered necessary in a
police interview. A multiple regression analysis revealed no significant predictors
of personality factors on the interview performance. The authors concluded