by MAC-3
Do not feel embarrassed about failing to censure those whom you feel deserve it. You do not violate your personal code of conduct by treating all interviewees with nonjudgmental acceptance. On the contrary, it is the brutal tactics of the past that do the most harm. Such methods cause useless anxiety and distress; they hurt the naive and sensitive while further alienating the sophisticated and cynical. Tactics of brutality might boost the interviewer’s self-image but, in the long run, will not advance his or her professional career.
The ability to size up people and to read their basic personality type is a useful skill. Adapt your interviewing techniques to suit each interviewee. Many people interpret hurried methods and indifference as signs of insincerity. With interviewees of this type, you’ll need to take your time and clearly express your interest in what they have to say. Other interviewees respond well to a busi-nesslike attitude. To gain the trust and respect of this type of person, have facts and figures at your fingertips, and use systematic, thorough methods. Other interviewees feel a strong moral obligation to speak the truth. Overall, with interviewees who are predis-
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posed to be cooperative and truthful, most of the methods and techniques suggested in this book will be unnecessary. As you seek to uncover the truth in an interview, be alert to—and seize—opportunities as they arise. Do not adhere rigidly to your favorite interviewing methods. Without losing sight of your objective, try several methods of questioning with uncooperative interviewees.
This is where the art of interviewing enters the picture.
CURIOSITY
Curiosity is closely tied to enthusiasm or eagerness to learn. By having a generous interest to comprehend details of a situation through the eyes of the interviewee, the investigator not only sees facts more clearly but also has a chance to evaluate the interviewee.
Suspicion is a part of the investigator’s job. Investigative interviews necessarily take place to uncover the truth, and you may suspect that each interviewee has some piece of the truth to reveal. You might well question the trustworthiness of everyone you encounter. After all, trusting every interviewee completely would be naive. Nevertheless, being rigidly and overtly suspicious of everyone is not appropriate. Hide your suspiciousness behind a veneer of curiosity. Be inquisitive, and maintain a questioning attitude (Nirenberg 1963), but never allow your suspicions to show. Asking questions accusingly or suspiciously may offend the interviewee or arouse fear or defensiveness, all of which will negatively affect cooperation. Questions full of genuine curiosity rather than accusatory suspicion will further your investigation.
There may come a time in the interview when it is appropriate to begin to reveal your suspicions. As you approach an interrogation, you might indicate that you sense the interviewee is not revealing important information. Through observation of an interviewee’s verbal and nonverbal signals, the astute interviewer will evaluate whether or not the signals tend to indicate deceptive efforts. If an interviewer senses that an interviewee is being deceptive, the investigator may choose to enter into an
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interrogation or take some other logical path, such as the use of a polygraph examination.
IMAGINATION
Imagination has a part to play in the training of interviewers as well as in preparing for and conducting actual interviews. An excellent method for developing practical interviewing skills is to pool your ideas with one or more other imaginative interviewers.
Group role playing can be used to test the ideas you generate.
This approach allows the less imaginative and less assertive interviewers to benefit from their more skilled peers. Overly aggressive interviewers who think highly of their skills with people may learn, to their dismay, that there are interviewees who are more intelligent and more imaginative than they are (Nierenberg 1968). As general preparation for interviewing, strive to broaden your knowledge and awareness of other people in order to improve your ability to imagine the unimaginable.
Part of a successful interviewing venture is to try to consider why you might have done the crime. You should ask yourself questions like, What excuses might I have to steal, or molest, or murder, or sell secrets? Imagine the motivation of the thief or murderer while conducting the interview. Don’t be surprised by any basis for the event under investigation—people justify, blame, and rationalize in ways that lack logic.
During an actual interview, use your imagination to anticipate possible contingencies and to plan the most effective responses. Your vicarious sensing through imagined participation allows you to better conceive the matter under investigation. An unimaginative investigator may think, “I could never imagine how a father could ever do such a thing to his daughter,” while working on a molestation case. However, the most productive investigators have the ability to imagine the worst of human’s inhumanity toward other people. Imagination is a special quality not shared by all investigators. Those who possess it naturally are fortunate for it is questionable whether imagination can be taught.
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INTUITION
“The heart has reasons of which reason has no knowledge.”
—Pascal
Imagination, knowledge, and awareness combine to produce intuition. Intuition has many other names: instinct, perception, gut feeling, hunch, sixth sense, third ear, reading between the lines, quick insight. It is the power of knowing through the senses, without recourse to inference or reasoning. As Edward Sapir (1884–1939), an American anthropologist who laid the foundation for modern linguistics, wrote: “We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might say, in accordance with an elaborate code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all” (Sapir 1949, pp. 533–543). Most people possess a remarkable sensitivity to others, but their intuition remains dormant in the subconscious because it is never brought into play. The seeds of intuition are probably within you to be discovered, nurtured, and enhanced.
Although some people disregard intuition and consider its use unscholarly, I consider it to be a valuable asset in interviewing. Keen intuition is spontaneous, accurate, and helpful, but difficult to explain. In an interview, allow your intuitive judgment to help you select the investigative pathways you will pursue. Let your intuition direct the interview and guide your responses. In all of your interactions with interviewees, be alert to hints of facts and feelings revealed by a slip of the tongue, but conceal your interest. Subtle behavioral cues, words, gestures, and body language can direct you if you listen to your intuition.
This is not to imply that you shouldn’t plan your approach.
Rather, a good balance is required. Acquiring a mental storehouse of information about human behavior is a must. As Alexander Pope so aptly said, “The proper study of mankind is man.” With that study comes greater success.
Try to achieve a careful balance of the scientific and the intuitive so that you can avoid rigid procedures in your interviews.
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Listen to your intuition during an interview, and allow it to guide you through sensitive issues. Otherwise, you will be unprepared for the spontaneous developments that occur in most interviews.
As the Greek philosopher Heracleitus proclaimed around 500
B.C., “If you expect not the unexpected, ye shall not find the truth.” Since seeking truth is your primary objective, you must expect the unexpected.
Trust yourself to understand what your intuition senses.
Seemingly insignificant messages may help you develop the information you need. Bodily tension, flushing, excitability, frustration, evasiveness, and dejection can either confirm or contradict the interviewee’s words. Actively listen by drawing on your knowledge and the storehouse of experiences in your subconscious. The subtleties of the interviewee’s behavior can influence your judgment. Therefore, concentrate on
using your intuition, knowledge, and experience to capture every subtlety you sense.
At first, you may not understand the apparently arbitrary techniques used by skilled interviewers. They frequently cannot explain the role of intuition in their interviewing process. Still, proficient interviewers confidently nurture their intuitive judgments and act on them. They sense the interviewee’s tenseness and spontaneously select the words or actions that will encourage truthful responses. If you want to follow their example, you will have to learn how to trust your intuition. You will find that your total sensing of the situation, along with your common sense, is more trustworthy than your intellect.
In most worthwhile endeavors, the degree of your success is directly related to the effort you make. This applies equally to using intuition. Your hunches cannot bear fruit until you put them into action. Initially, rely on your self-confidence to imple-ment your intuitive judgments, and be prepared to learn from your success or failure. Work through the various steps of interviewing, following the generally accepted concepts, but also work on developing techniques that capitalize on your intuitive talents. Use your intuition positively to read the interviewee’s
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psychological movements, feelings, private logic or rationale, and any other signs that will help you achieve your goal.
The Intuition of Interviewees
Interviewees, too, are intuitive, and it would be foolhardy to ignore their ability to sense your judgments. In fact, through their exercise of their intuition, perhaps to achieve less-than-positive ends, they may have become quite skillful. Keenly alert to your signals, they respond positively or negatively to what they sense about you and your presentation. They scrutinize your every move and gesture, the delivery of your questions, and your reactions to their answers. Therefore, ask yourself these questions:
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Do I plan each interview in advance?
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Do I convey a calm composure?
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Do I spend whatever time is needed to complete the interview?
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Do I demonstrate that I care about the interviewee and am not just performing a routine job?
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Do I understand that displaying an accepting attitude toward all interviewees does not mean that I condone antisocial behavior and does not compromise my personal values?
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Do I understand that interviewees are secretly searching for a signal from me that it is indeed okay to be open and to reveal themselves?
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Do I consciously provide positive signals so that interviewees can count on my acceptance and fairness?
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Do I understand that I may subconsciously project dislike and censure during interviews, triggering hostile feelings, threatening rapport, and setting the stage for the interviewee to terminate the interview?
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REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How does your attitude influence the outcome of an interview?
2. Identify and discuss the three main components of a positive attitude.
3. What is the first step in changing your attitude?
4. In what ways does flexibility help during an interview?
5. Why strive to appear curious rather than suspicious?
6. What is the role of imagination in an interview?
7. What is intuition?
8. How can intuition be valuable to the interview process?
4
Evidence
All clues, all traces of evidence are valuable when solving a crime.
Even small bits of evidence may help prove someone’s guilt, while limiting the search for evidence may lead to charging the wrong person with the crime. Therefore, the search for guilt or innocence arises out of the examination of all available evidence.
REAL, DOCUMENTARY, AND TESTIMONIAL
EVIDENCE
There are three basic types of evidence. Real and documentary evidence make up about 20 percent of all evidence presented in courts of law; testimonial evidence accounts for the remaining 80 percent.
Real, or physical, evidence is something you can photograph, chart, put your hands on, pick up, or store. It consists of tangible items, such as a bullet, a tire track, and a fingerprint. Real evidence is usually found at a crime scene and pertains to how the crime was committed and who is culpable. It is not based on the memory of the interviewee, unless it is found because a witness recalled where 47
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the shooter threw the gun or where the robber touched the bank counter. Such evidence is often volatile, fragile, and fleeting. It requires expert handling if it is to be useful in court. In handling real evidence, the investigator must maintain a chain of custody, which records how the evidence was handled, to prove that it was not contaminated in any way. Documentary evidence, on the other hand, is usually not found at a crime scene. Especially with crimes of passion, such as murder and assault, it is collected after the crime scene investigation has been completed. Documentary evidence often consists of a record or an account that will help investigators prove or disprove some fact. It includes such things as credit card receipts, hotel registers, and business records. Like real evidence, documentary evidence has substance. One difference is that real evidence is created as a by-product of a crime, while documentary evidence is often mandated or regulated in some way, such as records maintained in the normal course of business.
In many criminal investigations, such as cases of fraud or embezzlement, documents are the main form of evidence.
Investigators of such white-collar crimes make a special effort to legally and quickly collect documents to preserve them as evidence. Often, search warrants or subpoenas are required to obtain stored business documents.
The part played by documentary evidence in an investigation is based on what the document contains. For example, data entered into a diary by a victim, a witness, or a suspect could be vital corroboration of other evidence discovered in other ways through such data contained in telephone records, receipts, and so forth. Motel records might verify that a person was a guest at the motel on a particular day. Other documents might confirm that a person was at a certain place at a particular time or was engaged in a specified activity.
Testimonial evidence generally comes from interviews of victims, witnesses, and suspects. It is given verbally but might subsequently be recorded in written form. Admissions and confessions gained through the interrogation of a subject are one kind of testimonial evidence.
Evidence
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Interviewing is the primary method of collecting testimonial evidence. Interviews are different from interrogations in that their objectives differ. The goal of interviewing is to collect truthful data to be used for informed decision making and just action taking. An interrogation, on the other hand, is a face-to-face meeting with a subject with the distinct objective of gaining an admission or a confession in a real or apparent violation of law or policy.
VOLUNTARY CONFESSIONS
A confession must be voluntary, or it will be rejected as evidence at a trial or administrative hearing. Seeking a confession from the interviewee is inappropriate, at least initially. However, if you seek to uncover the truth while treating the culpable interviewee with compassion, a confession may follow. To ensure that a confession holds up in court, follow proper procedures in arranging for the interrogation of the subject, as well as during the interrogation itself. A confession obtained after a “pickup” without probable cause (that is, reasonable grounds) to make an actual arrest may not be used as evidence ( Dunaway v. New York [1979]).
Law enforcement officers must make it clear when a suspect is not under arrest and must document that the suspect is free to leave if he or she so desires. If the inquiry is held in an official location, such as a station house, it is imperative that i
nterviewees comprehend that they are not being detained or in custody, if such is the case. Voluntary response is vital in these matters. To fight the admissibility of a confession in court, defense attorneys sometimes argue that psychological coercion was used to obtain the confession.
The Miranda Warnings
Before a person in police custody or otherwise deprived of freedom “in any significant way” may be interrogated, the following warnings must be given ( Miranda v. Arizona [1966]):
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1. You have a right to remain silent, and you need not answer any questions.
2. If you do answer questions, your answers can be used as evidence against you.
3. You have a right to consult with a lawyer before or during the questioning by the police.
4. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be provided for you without cost.
These warnings have come to be known as the Miranda warnings, after the U.S. Supreme Court case in which they were enumerated.
The Miranda warnings apply only to “investigative custodial questioning aimed at eliciting evidence of a crime.” Subjects in custody must understand what they are being told. The investigator is not permitted to bully them into talking once they decide not to do so, nor may the investigator attempt to dissuade them from speaking with a lawyer. This ensures that subjects in custody know that they have the right to remain silent ( Harryman v. Estelle [1980]).
After receiving the required warnings and expressing willingness to answer questions, a subject in custody may legally be interrogated. It is unnecessary to embellish the Miranda warnings or to add new warnings. Similarly, it is unnecessary to use the exact language contained in Miranda. “Quite the contrary,”
