Assessing the efficacy of investigative interviewing training courses: A systematic review

Substantial resources have been dedicated to designing and implementing training courses that focus on enhancing the interviewing skills of police officers. Laboratory research studies and real-world assessments of the effectiveness of interview training courses, however, have found notably mixed results. In this article, empirical studies ( N = 30) that have assessed the effectiveness of police interview and interrogation training courses were systematically reviewed. We found a wide variation in terms of the type, length, and content of the training courses, the performance criteria used to assess the training effectiveness, and the impact of the training courses on interviewing performance. Overall, the studies found that basic interviewing skills can be developed to a certain level through even short evidence-based training courses. More cognitively demanding skills, such as question selection and meaningful rapport-building, showed less of an improvement post training. The courses that included multiple training sessions showed the most consistent impact on interviewing behavior. This review also indicated a need for more systematic research on training effectiveness with more uniform and longer-term measures of effectiveness. Our findings should help guide future research on this specific topic and inform the training strategies of law enforcement and other investigatory organizations.

The HIG Project

When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began its interrogation program post-9/11, it adopted tactics developed by the Agency after the Korean Conflict and deployed in Southeast Asia and Latin America during the Cold War. As some of these tactics had become part of military counter-interrogation training, we argue here that none of these tactics were new. In addition, they were based on the false assumption that resistance can be overcome with pain and that once this is achieved, a detainee will provide valid information—contrary to both the science known on September 11, 2001, and to what seasoned military and civilian interrogators argued for at the time. In the wake of this program, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was set up at the beginning of the Obama administration with the mandate to develop research to assess the tactics of the 2006 Army Field Manual (comprising all of the approved interrogation approaches and techniques for military and intelligence agencies) and to develop new interrogation methods based on science. The HIG Research Program, in place since 2010, has now produced a robust and public set of findings on rapport-based, information-gathering interrogation tactics based on sound science. We argue that whether these findings will be sufficient to sustain against the naïve assumption that pain makes people talk remains an open question.