Police officers' use of evidence to elicit admissions in a fictitious criminal case

Journal article


Tekin, S., Granhag, P. A., Stromwall, L. and Vrij, A. (2016). Police officers' use of evidence to elicit admissions in a fictitious criminal case. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling. pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1002/jip.1463
AuthorsTekin, S., Granhag, P. A., Stromwall, L. and Vrij, A.
Abstract

We examined how police officers planned to interview suspects in a situation where they lacked information about a critical phase of a crime (i.e., the time during which the crime took place) but possessed information about less critical phases of the crime (i.e., the time before and/or after the crime took place). The main focus was the officers' planned use of the available information (evidence) to elicit admissions about the critical phase. A survey was distributed to police officers (n = 69) containing a fictitious murder case
for which they were to prepare an interview with a suspect. The investigators planned to disclose the evidence more often in a strategic manner (obtaining the suspect's statement and exhausting alternative scenarios before revealing the evidence) than in a non‐ strategic manner (revealing the evidence before requiring an explanation). The investigators' most frequently reported reason for their planned evidence use was to collect additional information about the particular phase to which the disclosed evidence pertained. It was rare that the investigators planned to disclose the evidence about a less critical phase of the crime in order to elicit admissions about the more critical phase (e.g., by disclosing the evidence to try to shift the suspect's counter‐interrogation strategy from less to more orthcoming). The investigators may benefit from recent research showing that strategic evidence disclosure can be used as a means to elicit admissions about a phase of a crime for which information is lacking.

Keywordsadmissions, evidence disclosure, police officers, suspect interviews
Year2016
JournalJournal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling
Journal citationpp. 1-14
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1002/jip.1463
Publication dates
Print23 Aug 2016
Publication process dates
Accepted09 Apr 2016
Deposited15 Oct 2019
Accepted author manuscript
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File Access Level
Open
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