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28 Psych., Crime & L. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/pcyceadl28 and id is 1 raw text is: PSYCHOLOGY, CRIME & LAW 2022, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 1-19 https://doi.org/1 0.1080/1068316X.2021.1876051 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Co-occurrences among interrogation tactics in actual criminal investigations* Jeffrey Kaplan and Brian Cutler Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, ON, Canada ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY During police interrogations, trained investigators may use Received 29 June 2020 different tactics to elicit information from criminal suspects. Accepted 9 November 2020 Through this exploratory research, we investigated which tactics were used most frequently by investigators in actual police KEYWORDS interrogations and how they used tactics in combination. We interrogation strategies; coded 50 videotaped interrogations recorded in North America interrogation observation; for 25 unique tactics as they were used by investigators. We suspect questioning; suspect divided each interrogation into 3-minute time blocks, counted interviews the tactics that were used within each time block, and conducted a principal component analysis on those frequencies. We expected our analyses to reveal patterns of tactic use but had no a priori hypotheses about how investigators would combine and sequence interrogation tactics. Presenting evidence was the most common tactic, and investigators used minimization more than maximization tactics. The tactics grouped into seven components, indicating that they had been used by investigators within the same time blocks. Post hoc examination of those components revealed that tactics used in temporal proximity shared logical connections and segued into one another to form multifaceted persuasive messages. For instance, making accusations and increasing suspects' guilt were often employed before offering justifications. This research provides insight into how interrogation tactics relate to one another during police interrogations. North American police officers who are first responders likely question potential suspects in an ad hoc manner; these officers generally do not receive extensive training in inter- view and interrogation methods (Bradford & Pynes, 1999) and often have little time or information on which to base a strategy of suspect questioning. Contrastingly, once an investigation has been conducted and a suspect identified and taken into custody, the proceeding interviews and interrogations are highly structured (Leo, 2008). At the broad- est level, suspect questioning strategies are typically divided into information-gathering interviews and accusatory interrogations. Information-gathering methods, such as PEACE (Milne & Bull, 1999), are premised on rapport building and eliciting full CONTACT Jeffrey Kaplan Jeffrey.Kaplan@ontariotechu.net Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Ontario Tech University, 2000 Simcoe St North, Oshawa, ON, Canada L1H 7K4 *An earlier version of this research was previously presented at the 2019 AP-LS Conference. The data associated with this research are available through the Center for Open Science at https://osf.io/g5u7q/ © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group