Police interrogations
Police are rethinking how they question suspects
Law enforcement across the US is changing the way officers question suspects.
Detectives extract confessions from people in an interrogation room by getting right up in the suspect’s face. But during a pandemic, being confined within 6 feet of a stranger in a small, underventilated space can be deadly.
Police departments are changing how they conduct interrogations, according to a Marshall Project survey of police chiefs and investigators across the nation. Detectives in Philadelphia, Miami and elsewhere said they conduct interviews out in the street and 6 feet apart, instead of indoors. In Clearwater, Florida, they often do so in the parking lot outside their station.
When police officers do bring people back to the precinct, they question them from another room, via Zoom or Skype – or at least from the other end of a large conference table.
This is frustrating to some officers who said they rely on physical proximity and eye contact to intimidate suspects into telling the truth or to read their facial expressions for clues as to whether they are lying. The fact that masks are largely required during interrogations, some said, obstructs this sort of nonverbal information-gathering.
“We’re social animals. We’re not wired to communicate at a distance, especially not about sensitive things,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national organization of law enforcement officials. “That’s why we don’t just send suspects a list of written questions; no serious investigator would operate that way.”
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died with a Minneapolis officer's knee pressed into his neck, many Americans call for an end to policing predicated on force and coercion. Policing experts said the social distancing of interrogations could be a blessing in disguise.
More outdoor interrogations could mean more bystanders’ eyes on what the interrogators say and do – in other words, more civilian oversight of police. Similarly, more interviews conducted by videoconference between the rooms of a police station should leave little legal excuse for cops not to record the footage, in turn allowing judges and juries to see whether a confession was fairly obtained. Remote questioning also allows a department’s best interviewer to conduct the interrogation even if he or she can’t be there in person.
More reliance on verbal communication rather than on physical cues such as eye contact could make detectives better interviewers.
Protesters have focused on the issue of police use of force in the community,
“We’ll probably continue this practice even after the pandemic is over, because we’re getting to question people on the scene when their memory is fresh ...” Frank Vanore Chief inspector in Philadelphia, speaking of conducting interviews in the field
“but we’ve got to recognize that that same police culture is inside, in the interrogation room, too,” said James Trainum, a former homicide detective in Washington and an expert and consultant on interrogations and confessions. “It’s that same mindset of using physicality instead of really listening to and respecting citizens, and it doesn’t build the rapport with people that’s needed to actually solve crimes.”
New techniques
Between the pandemic and the protests, some law enforcement agencies are adjusting their practices.
As early as mid-March, officers in Miami weighed the health risks of every potential interrogation, according to Armando Aguilar, assistant chief of the Miami Police Department. They bring suspects inside – into their squad cars and offices – only in the most serious cases, including murders, rapes and armed robberies.
“If it’s something like a single auto theft, and we already have the evidence we need, we’re forgoing a formal interview,” Aguilar said.
In Philadelphia, Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said the department’s practice is to conduct many interviews in the field, which a body camera records. “We’ll probably continue this practice even after the pandemic is over, because we’re getting to question people on the scene when their memory is fresh and before they clam up about coming in to talk to us,” he said.
The main exception, Vanore noted, is in the most sensitive cases such as those handled by the department’s special
victims unit, in which interviewees are so vulnerable they need to be sure what they say is confidential.
One of the nation’s leading interrogation consulting firms, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, which has trained hundreds of thousands of police and federal agents in interview techniques, said it is accelerating its transition to teaching more nonconfrontational methods of questioning suspects.
Cops were historically trained to invade someone’s physical space to increase their anxiety, said Dave Thompson, vice president of operations at Wicklander. “That style was hopefully already beginning to be eradicated, but what’s happening with COVID is accelerating that,” he said.
Thompson noted that manipulative tactics meant to make interviewees feel physically vulnerable, therefore dependent on their interrogator’s mercy, are more likely to make them feel they need to make a false confession.
Building better rapport
There are downsides to the shift in interview practices nationwide. Trying to convince a witness to a traumatizing crime to speak up is more difficult in public than in private. For victims, being in-person with a detective “shows them that we care – they can see it in our face, hear it in our voice – that we’re engaged with what they went through,” said Sgt. Reggie Williams of the Hampton Police Division in Virginia.
For suspects, it may become harder to have an attorney present if police conduct interrogations immediately at a crime scene or by phone.
Being interrogated outside the confines of a closed room might give people a greater sense of their right to just walk away, but research by Fabiana Alceste, a psychology professor at Butler University, suggests that many suspects will still feel the “perception of custody” even in the current circumstances.
Alceste conducted experiments in which people in seemingly “free” situations – talking to police openly, not behind locked doors, not handcuffed – struggle to say no to an authority figure. They don’t want to look guilty, and they often don’t know their rights.
“The pandemic may actually heighten the legal tension between what is objectively versus subjectively a situation of officially being in custody,” she said.
As for the quality of information gathered in interrogations during the pandemic, many police officials said it’s too soon to know. Some, including Lt. Michael Walek of the Clearwater Police Department in Florida, pointed out that detectives are taught to present facts – to tell the suspect that it is known that they were at a certain place at a certain time – then to see whether the person reacts by finger-tapping, toe-tapping, looking away or getting evasive or angry.
Without those signals, Walek said, it can be more difficult to know where to go with the next question.
Other policing experts countered that conventional wisdom about interrogations, widely taught at police academies and passed down among cops, is mostly pseudoscience.
“Police have a confirmation bias going on: They’re looking at a suspect as a suspect,” Trainum said. “A person could be experiencing anxiety for a completely different reason – like the fact that they are being interrogated by the police.”
Trainum said the pandemic may offer an opportunity for greater rapport building in the interrogation setting. Police, he said, could openly say to suspects, “Isn’t this a pain in the a-- that we’re trying to have this conversation through masks?” to get a laugh, start a dialogue and ultimately elicit information.
This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, in partnership with NBC News.