The issue of police interrogations has been pertinent for more than forty years. In 1966, the famous Miranda ruling noted that interrogations were usually done in privacy, an aspect that resulted to secrecy; hence, courts could not be aware of the events that take place in an interrogation room when dishing out justice. Despite an increased amount of research since the Miranda ruling, challenges persist in the administration of justice due to lack of empirical data. Research has been on an exponential trajectory, with five issues coming out strongly: distinguishing truthful and deceptive statements, Miranda rights to inform custodial suspects that they will be interrogated, interrogation tactics, time that the accused expend in interrogation quarters and the level at which defendants make admissions to police during interrogations. Other imminent problems include the accuracy of interrogation outcomes, as some suspects are forced to make confessions. Particularly, the issue of accuracy becomes complicated because researchers have not found a credible method to dig into it. The way the recordings are done is a source of concern, as police officers just present fragments, instead of recordings of the full proceedings.
The survey, dubbed “Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Belies” sought to research into an untouched area, or interrogation from the police perspective. Police officers were asked to answer questions in six categories, as highlighted in the first paragraph (five issues) with the sixth being the way police handled recordings. The research aimed at getting a firsthand perspective to be able to distinguish between commonly held norms and police behaviors outside this normal. The research sampled 631 police officers, with 574 coming from USA and 57 from Canada. The USA participants came from five states; California, Texas, Maryland, Massachusetts and Florida. The participants filled a fifteen-minute questionnaire that asked experience based questions on the behavior of suspects, and the different ways they coerced them into confession, including innocent confessions (either to the police or relatives).
Outliers were removed from the analysis first, to avoid skewing the results towards extreme ends. The measures of central tendency; mean, median, mode and standard deviation were applied on the data and sample sizes differed with each questionnaire entry, as some participants left some questions unanswered. Respondents were asked questions in the six categories, and the answers can be summarized as; policemen believed that they can distinguish truthful and deceptive suspects at a rate of 77%, that 81% of suspects waived their Miranda rights with rate being 73% with guilty suspects and 84% of innocent people and, in most cases, the suspects were isolated from friends and families during interrogation with the policemen putting suspects in separate rooms 41% of all the times. On the settings and frequency of investigations, suspects were interrogated at least 3.08 times per charge; It was also revealed that interrogations were done around the clock with 60% of the interrogations being made between 8 O’clock and 8 PM. A further 23% was carried between 8 pm to 10 pm, and it is only 17% of the interrogations that were done during sleeping hours. About recording of interrogations, only 16% of participants indicated that they were required to record interrogations, with 84% saying they do not have to record. Finally, the policemen said that confession rates and self-incriminating statements stood at 67%, meaning that two-thirds of suspects made statements that held them to responsibility for the crimes suspected of (Pang and Ye, 2016)
The participants admitted to using evidence presentation to victims as a way to get confessions from them (the idea, here, is to make the suspect feel like the truth is already known, so the best thing will be to cooperate with police). The participants did not agree to the use of high-pressure tactics (but it should be well noted that the survey was a self-report. Hence this would not be expected). However, they agreed to the use of two methods that are allowed by the federal and Canadian law; the use of evidence ploy and making comments that are designed to minimize the seriousness of the interrogation. Other coercive methods included isolation, the creation of rapport, presentation of evidence and issuing threats to the suspects. On the length of interrogations, the respondents indicated that the average time for an interrogation is 1.6 hours, and the longest one is 4.21 hours, a figure that is largely shorter than the 16.3 hours rate found in population of false confessions report. In addition to the length of the interrogation, the time of the exercise has a direct impact on the responses of the suspects, with confession rates after midnight being 83%, 15% above the normal self-incrimination and confession rate. The anomaly is informed by the fact that suspects are burned out at late night, increasing their susceptibility to making confessions (Kassin et al., 2007).
The research had several shortcomings and challenges; first, the sample was not random, because it was based on a volunteer model. The questions of the survey were susceptible to corroboration, as it was clear that the officers gave answers that were close to past data reports. The method of self-reporting makes the research incomplete, as it lacks a comparative aspect that would give it a perspective.
References
Kassin, S. M., Leo, R. A., Meissner, C. A., Richman, K. D., Colwell, L. H., Leach, A.-M., & La Fon, D. (2007). Police interviewing and interrogation: A self-report survey of police practices and beliefs. Law and Human Behavior, 31(4), 381–400. doi:10.1007/s10979- 006-9073-5
Pang, J., & Ye, N. (2016). Exploring identities in police interrogations. Semiotica, 2016(209), . doi:10.1515/sem-2016-0004
