Ethical Interviews Flashcards
What is ethical interviewing?
Interviewing an offender or someone charged with a crime, before being sentenced has to be done ethically. This can be challenging as the interviewers will not be immune to such issue. It is the interviewer in charge of the interview who is responsible for working ethically.
Why would interrogation be less successful than ethical interviewing?
- It is more personal
- Is stigmatised negatively
- In a very pressurised situation which is purposefully used to be intimidating.
- Ethical interviewing is more conversational and friendly.
What is PEACE?
Focuses on building a rapport with suspects in order to avoid negative emotions and to allow self- determination. This incorporates elements of he cognitive interview and conversation management.
PEACE
P - create and record interview
- Introduction and rapport
E - pace requirements, reasons and routine.
A- Opening, take and develop account, have clarification and challenge parts, probe detail and repeat probe process throughout.
C- Closure
E- Evaluate investigation and interviewer.
P (Planning and preparation)
The planning phase is about the importance of planning an interview before carrying it out such as noting aims and objectives as well as required outcomes. Topics of interest and questions are designed and recorded. They will also plan the time of the interview and the place it will be conducted.
E (Engage and explain)
This is where the suspect first comes in where the interviewer will explain what is going to happen and what they are doing. This is also where a rapport is built with a suspect which means they explain how the interview will take place and to answer questions to alloy concerns and are told what to expect. Rapport is built through questions such as “The weather is nice today, don’t you think?” and “ How’ve you been today?”
A (Account)
This is the invitation to the suspect to find out what they are feeling or thinking. The account will be elicited depending on what they are trying to investigate and achieve. The interviewer will also have tag questions to either confine or challenge the suspect based on things they said. This is to probe for finer details that may be missed otherwise. Things such as “so you mentioned this before” and then a question asking about that.
C (Closure)
This brings the interview to a close by maintaining the rapport in case the interviewing has missed details and needs to repeat this again. This should alleviate any anxiety that they may feel after the account stage to calm them down and feel friendly again. This usually involves general chit chat and “thank you”.
E (evaluate)
This is where the interviewer sits down and reads over every note they have made or rewatches the tape if there was one. This would probe them to think, “have we got everything that we need?” for them to review the data and make sure they have the correct material obtained.
Milne and Bull found that police officers would judge effectiveness of an interview based on whether the suspect confessed.
Measuring the effectiveness of an interview based on confessions rather than if the suspect confessed or not is not an accurate measure of effectiveness. Therefore this is a weakness as we can’t tell how effective they actually are in a police setting.
Walsh and Bull found good interviewing in each of the recommended PEACE stages generally led to better interviews.
This means that the ethical interview is useful and also indicates the importance of each stage of the interview being carried out effectively.
Clarke and Milne compares of pre- PEACE and post - PEACE interviews seem to suggest clear improvement in being an ethical approach to interviewing.
These suggested clear improvements in being an ethical approach to interviewing.
Roberts (2011) findings concluded that the use of aggressive interviewing strategies is likely to result in unreliable information and can be detrimental to police community relations.
This means that ethical interviewing would be more productive in ensuring a good relationship between police and public which means that people are more likely to come forward about a crime and be more comfortable talking to the police than if they had a conditioned fear of them.
