Interview and Interrogation Techniques Tip 22

Interview and Interrogation Techniques Tip 22

Are You “Staging” Your Interview Room? Should You?

101 Tips for Interviewers and Interrogators
Stan B. Walters The Lie Guy® Blog

Great interviewers should not have to manipulate their subjects during interviewing and interrogation to get cooperation or information.  They use interview and interrogation techniques that are effective and ethical persuasion tactics.  So what role or value if any does “staging” evidence in the interview room have during professional interviewing and interrogation?

Maps, charts, sketches, DVDs or CDs with the subject’s name written on the label, file folders full of papers, crime scene photos and more.  I’ve heard many of these ideas as being great tactics to convince your subject that the evidence is overwhelming and that it is in their best interest to confess.  It’s as if the interviewer should even not to conduct any interviewing or interrogation of the subject?

I’ve got three problems with these interview and interrogation techniques and tactics –

1. If you ARE displaying this type evidence in front of your subject during interviewing and interrogation sessions, then you are contaminating your subject’s knowledge base.  What you will wind up getting from them is nothing more than an “echo effect” and first hand knowledge.  One of the three reasons interviewing and interrogation sessions fail is the contamination of your subject.  To review, watch video Interviewing and Interrogation Tip # 17 “Do You Employ S.U.E.?
   
2. If you are using made up or “faked evidence” then you are lying to you subject. You are “manipulating” your subject and not persuading them.  You also run the risk at getting caught at lying to your subject and thereby losing all credibility as the interviewer.  Watch video Interviewing and Interrogation Tip # 39 Lying to Your Subject .
   
3. Such attempts at manipulation of the subject or lying to them during interviewing and interrogation dramatically increases the risk of false and coerced confessions. Watch video Interviewing and Interrogation Tip # 36 5 Keys to False Confessions.

If you are doing your job as a professional interviewer and interrogator and are using ethical persuasion tactics, you don’t need to “stage” your interview room.