Untapped Potential? A Survey Study with German Police Officers into Suspect Interviewing Practices and the Strategic Use of Evidence

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique is a promising suspect interviewing approach that takes the potentially incriminating information against a suspect (i.e., the evidence) into account and aims at actively eliciting diagnostic cues to deception and truth. The technique was successfully tested in multiple research studies and has been introduced to practitioners in different parts of the world (including Germany). However, not much is known about German police officers’ state of practice, their knowledge, as well as how they perceive and evaluate SUE. The current survey study is the first attempt to generate knowledge on this topic by collecting data from police officers from the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg. The majority of police officers kept a balance between applying non-standardized/standardized interviewing approaches, discussing preplanned/spontaneous themes in the interview and making analytical/gut decisions on when and how to use evidence during suspect interviews. Regarding their suspect interviewing training, only a minority of the officers reported to have received training on how to use evidence during an interview. These findings – in combination with the observation that the majority of the officers did not see potential obstacles with the applicability of the SUE technique – suggest a major untapped potential of strategic evidence disclosure techniques within current suspect interviewing in Germany.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Forensic Psychology:Research and Practice - publication information to come