Psychologically based Virtual-Suspect for Interrogative Interview Training

In this paper, we present a Virtual-Suspect system which can be used to train inexperienced law enforcement personnel in interrogation strategies. The system supports different scenario configurations based on historical data. The responses presented by the Virtual-Suspect are selected based on the psychological state of the suspect, which can be configured as well. Furthermore, each interrogator's statement affects the Virtual-Suspect's current psychological state, which may lead the interrogation in different directions. In addition, the model takes into account the context in which the statements are made. Experiments with 24 subjects demonstrate that the Virtual-Suspect's behavior is similar to that of a human who plays the role of the suspect

Introduction: Serious Games for Law Enforcement Agencies

This chapter is an introduction to the field of serious games, with emphasis on law enforcement agencies. It outlines their use focusing on four concrete application cases: crime scene investigations, investigative interviews, communication skills and terrorism training. It further outlines the general benefits of serious games compared to traditional training methods

ISPO: a serious game to train the interview skills of police officers

The training of Police Interview competencies relies on the hiring of actors to play the role of victims, witnesses and suspects. While role-play can be a particularly effective training technique, it requires a significant amount of resources. The Interview Sim-ulation for Police Officers (ISPO) is a serious game developed as a collaboration of Gameware Europe with the Portuguese School of Police Officers. The objective of the game is to train police officers in communication competencies related to the interview of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Through ISPO, players can take the role of a police interviewer and practice the techniques and methodologies learned in theoretical classes. The serious game offers a safe, lightweight and easily repeatable experience. In order to evaluate the training effectiveness of the serious game, a study was con-ducted with 194 participants where general subjective learning effectiveness was mea-sured. Overall, the ISPO game improved the self-perceived competence of its players. Additionally, participants changed their opinion regarding the most valuable attitudes necessary to conduct a successful interview. Finally, the interaction with the game had a stronger effect on inexperienced users. These results lead us to believe that ISPO can be an added value to police officer schools.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

False Confessions from the Viewpoint of Federal Polygraph Examiners

While confessions are a powerful form of evidence, innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Many researchers have studied false confessions through laboratory experiments with university students or by focusing on proven cases of false confession. These approaches have led many researchers to form a conceptual framework that law enforcement interrogative methods are a key cause of false confessions. A gap exists in the literature as few researchers have queried law enforcement about false confessions or consulted with officers who specialize in interrogation. For this study, a qualitative case study approach was used to explore the experiences of 13 federal law enforcement polygraph examiners who specialize in interrogation. Telephone interviews were conducted regarding their approach to criminal interrogation, their experiences with false confessions, and the circumstances when false confessions were elicited. NVivo software was used to organize the data. Common themes in interview responses were identified and reduced to a simplified format that could be understood in the context of the research questions. The themes identified that participants conduct themselves professionally, they treat criminal subjects respectfully, they avoid unethical interrogative practices, and false confessions result from individual subject characteristics and police misconduct. No participants reported eliciting a false confession. These findings suggest that false confession researchers may have a biased view of how law enforcement officers interrogate due to their overreliance on laboratory experimentation and their focus on false confession cases. This study promotes positive social change by increasing truthful confessions, decreasing false confessions, and providing a more accurate view of what occurs during real world criminal interrogations

Behind Closed Doors: What Really Happens When Cops Question Kids

Police interrogation raises difficult legal, normative, and policy questions because of the State\u27s need to solve crimes and obligation to protect citizens\u27 rights. These issues become even more problematic when police question juveniles. For more than a century, justice policies have reflected two competing visions of youth: vulnerable and immature versus responsible and adult-like. A century ago, Progressive reformers emphasized youths\u27 immaturity and created a separate juvenile court to shield children from criminal trials and punishment. 2 By the end of the twentieth century, lawmakers adopted get tough policies, which equated adolescents with adults and punished youths more severely. 3 Over the past three decades, these changes have transformed the juvenile court from a social welfare agency into a second-class criminal court. 4 The direct results - institutional confinement - and collateral consequences - transfer to criminal court, use of delinquency convictions to enhance sentences, or sex offender registration - preclude fewer protections for interrogating juveniles than questioning adults.

Miranda in Taiwan: Why It Failed and Why We Should Care

In 1997, the Taiwanese legislature amended the Code of Criminal Procedure to incorporate the core of the American Miranda rule into the legal system. The Miranda rule requires police officers and prosecutors to notify criminal suspects subject to custodial interrogation of their right to remain silent and their right to retain legal counsel. In subsequent amendments, the legislature enacted a series of laws to further reform interrogation practices in the same vein. What happened next is a study in unintended consequences and the interdependence of law and culture. Using ethnographic methods and data sources collected over the past four years from 48 police officers and 99 prosecutors in metropolitan Taiwan, this Article relates a cautionary tale. Under Taiwan\u27s abbreviated Miranda system, suspects are encouraged to cooperate and give statements under the perception that they have been, and will continue to be, treated with politeness, dignity, and respect. Police and prosecutors use the Miranda mechanism (providing dignity, respect, and voice to suspects) to build rapport with suspects and distract them from the actual consequences of their full cooperation. Such concerns were implicated at a high level in the indictment of former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-Jeou in 2018, when prosecutors publicly denounced Ma for his bad attitude in exercising his right to remain silent during prosecutorial interviews. In short, Miranda in Taiwan has become a double-edged sword: it provides dignified and respectful treatment for suspects while simultaneously placing heavy extralegal burdens on them to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. Because Taiwan\u27s criminal justice system is a combination of western legal concepts and traditional Chinese social and cultural notions, Miranda and related rules have led to ever-greater discrepancies between what is written in the law books and how police interrogate in practice, and ever-greater gaps between suspects\u27 expectations and prosecutorial realities. Taiwan is not alone: more than one-hundred jurisdictions around the world now require warnings similar to the Miranda rule. It is possible that they suffer similar unintended consequences. I thus explore the effectiveness of alternative innovations beyond Miranda that could potentially reduce false confessions and minimize the risks caused by current interrogation practices