Unlocking the truth: guide to interrogation tactics

True crime stories have always been interesting especially interrogation footage.Youve heard of good copbad cop, and surprisingly that method does get confessions or information thats crucial to investigations. In watching interrogations, a pattern can be noticed. No matter the crime or the suspect profile, it seems a lot of detectives follow the same questioning style. After some digging i discovered something called the “REID technique”, which turns out to be the most popular method in the United States, and the most scrutinized in terms of ethics. 

The founder of this method, John E. Reid, was a polygraph expert and worked in many police departments in his career. He began forming his technique in 1947 and officially published it in the early 60’s. Today many courts have supported the Ried technique as the leading interrogation approach. Even the Supreme Court has praised Reid’s training as an example for proper training. Now most people's understanding is that the method is only used for interrogating but according to John E. Reid & Associates official website, its much deeper than that. In “A Description of The Reid Technique”, it’s broken into 3 main stages: fact analysis, investigative interview, and the actual interrogation. Fact analysis should be done regardless of the technique used to interrogate. It's simply reviewing the facts of the case at hand and creating a list of things to be discussed with the victim, witness, or suspect. Investigative interview is building rapport with the interviewee, learning about their day to day lives, small talk about the weather, and also to establish a baseline of their normal behaviors such as eye contact, posture, and the way they articulate things they know to be true. Now the juicy part is the interrogation which has 9 steps: initial confrontation, theme development, handling denial, overcoming objections, getting the subjects attention, handling any passiveness, gaining details of the admission, and recording the admission in writing. This step is the one that ruffles people's feathers. Now Reid & Associates say the goal of this step is to obtain the truth whether it's finding the subject innocent, finding that they lied about key details, if they know who committed the crime or if they did it themselves. However, many believe this is where investigators begin to act unethically. 

The main claim against the continuation of using the REID technique is that it leads to false confessions. Vanguard recently covered the topic in “Looking Back: The Reid Technique – Strong Risk of False Confessions and Wrongful Convictions” . At the time in 2020, 25% of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted due to DNA evidence were due to false confessions. They believe that the RIED process induces stress on the subject and forms a sense of pressue or coercion. The strategies they highlight as problematic are isolation, confrontation, and minimalization. Often the investigator isolates the subject, leaving them alone in the room for 30 minutes or even hours which they say “increases stress and the incentive to relieve that stress”. The subject may start to get tired, hungry or just feel more helpless in this situation. Then the confrontation occurs in which “the interrogator accuses the suspect of the crime, expresses certainty in that opinion, and blocks all denials, sometimes citing real or manufactured evidence to support the charge”. This means they can use false evidence to convince the subject they know for 100% fact that they are guilty, furthering the helplessness. Finally in minimization the investigator provides the subject with an alternative form of events that morally justify the subject committing the crime. At this point, the subject would be worn down looking for a way out so they accept whatever the investigator says as the truth leading to false confessions if they really are innocent. 

 Honestly, two things can be true at the same time. The Reid technique has been a staple in investigative training and the success rate of getting legal confessions is definetly unmatched. Unfortunately it has also been the cause of many wrongful convictions. It will be interesting to see how the future of police interviewing will look and if the next great technique will match the success of the Reid technique and solve its flaws or create just as much debate.