Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Interrogation in Britain 51
BRITISH TRAINING MANUALS
Until the early 1990s there was no systematic or formal national police training
in interviewing. However, in 1982 the Metropolitan (London) Police had begun
to offer a training course to officers and soon some other police forces developed
their own courses (see Mortimer & Shepherd, 1999, for an excellent review of
these early developments). The absence of formal training in police interviewing
was raised by the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (1981). The Royal
Commission recommended that police officers should receive proper training in
interviewing techniques. This emphasis for the need for national training was
taken up again during the subsequent Royal Commission on Criminal Justice
(1993), which stated:
The new national training in basic interviewing skills announced in Home Office
Circular 22/1992, as supplemented by Home Office Circular 7/1993 should, so far
as practicable, be given to all ranks of police officers (p. 189).
Walkley (1987) produced the first British police interrogation manual. This
manual was clearly heavily influenced by the work of Inbau, Reid and Buckley
(1986), although there were some differences. First, Walkley’s manual was
placed within the framework of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984,
although some of the persuasive and manipulative tactics recommended for
influencing the decision-making of the suspect were probably in breach of the
Police Codes of Practice. Furthermore, some of its content goes against the
general trend in England to place police interviewing training within the context
of a social skills model rather than manipulative procedures (Mortimer &
Shepherd, 1999; National Crime Faculty, 1996; Ord & Shaw, 1999). In spite of
the introduction of PACE, one police force in England went even further than
Walkley’s recommendations and largely adopted the Nine Steps of Interrogation
of Inbau, Reid and Buckley’s (Mortimer & Shepherd, 1999).
The emphasis in Walkley’s manual was very much on the interviewer learning
to read the correct ‘lie’ and ‘buy’ signs and becoming an ‘effective persuader’
in order to obtain a confession. Walkley (1987) gives the following example of
his recommended strategy:
The interviewer will first deal with the lie-telling denials which the suspect is
making and convince him that they have little or no value to him, possibly even
may have certain penalties. He will hint that confession on the other hand has
certain advantages. Whenever the suspect takes a step away from lie telling, he
will be rewarded by suitable reinforcement ploys (p. 109).
Walkley (1983) had previously completed a Master’s thesis where he discovered
that over half of the British detectives he interviewed claimed that they were
prepared to use force, or the threat of force, when questioning suspects (cited by
Williamson, 1994). It may be for this reason that the techniques recommended
by Inbau and his colleagues are sometimes resorted to by British detectives in
serious cases when confessions are not readily forthcoming (Irving & McKenzie,
1989; Pearse, 1997; Pearse & Gudjonsson, 1999).