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29 Psychiatry Psychol. & L. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/psylaw29 and id is 1 raw text is: Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 2022 Vol. 29, No. 1, 1-19, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2020.1784807 Ruiedge~U The impact of rapport on intelligence yield: police source handler telephone interactions with covert human intelligence sources Jordan Nunana , Ian Stanierb . Rebecca Milnea . Andrea Shawyera , Dave Walsh' and Brandon May alnstitute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK; bSchool of Justice Studies, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK; School of Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) provide unique access to criminals and organised crime groups, and their collection of intelligence is vital to understanding England and Wales' threat picture. Rapport is essential to the establishment and maintenance of effective professional relationships between source handlers and their CHIS. Thus, rapport-based interviewing is a fundamental factor to maximising intelligence yield. The present research gained unprecedented access to 105 real-life audio recorded telephone interactions between England and Wales police source handlers and CHIS. This research quantified both the rapport component behaviours (e.g., attention, positivity, and coordination) displayed by the source handler and the intelligence yielded from the CHIS, in order to investigate the frequencies of these rapport components and their relationship to intelligence yield. Overall rapport, attention and coordination significantly correlated with intelligence yield, while positivity did not. Attention was the most frequently used component of rapport, followed by positivity, and then coordination. Key words: Covert Human Intelligence Source; human intelligence; HUMINT; intelligence; interviewing; rapport; source handler. Introduction Everybody wants to talk. My job is to become the person he wants to talk to. (McCauley, 2007, p. 399) The collection of detailed, timely and reliable information plays a vital role for law enforce- ment agencies in bringing criminals to justice (Stanier & Nunan, 2018). The received action- able information, formally recognised as intelligence (Grieve, 2004), informs critical law enforcement decision-making concerning intelligence-led operations and investigative enquiries. One intelligence collection tactic is the official use of informants, deployed to pro- vide insider access to criminal activity and tar- gets of interest. Within England and Wales, an informant is legally defined as a Covert Human Intelligence Source (CHIS) under Section 26(8) Part II of the Regulation of Correspondence: Jordan Nunan, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 2HY, UK. Email: jordan.nunan@port.ac.uk This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. C 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.