Promoting justice: Professionalising frontline policing with an evidence-based Structured Interview Protocol

Evidence obtained from victims and witnesses is of critical importance to the criminal justice system. Current interview procedures for eliciting this evidence frequently fall short of best practice, and have not kept pace with theoretical developments relating to human memory. This is highly problematic as poor quality investigative interviewing leads to incomplete witness evidence at best, and unreliable evidence at worst.

Concerns over the quality of investigative interview skills is particularly acute for frontline uniformed officers who have a lack of policing experience coupled with demanding and multi-faceted work priorities. The provision of interview training for these officers is already severely limited; usually a couple of days of basic training are allocated to learning how to interact with victims and witnesses. At a time of financial austerity, when forces have been required to make savings of £2.4bn by 2015 due to a 20% cut in Home Office grants to police authorities, this situation is moving towards crisis point; the number of frontline officers is being reduced, officer workloads are increasing and there are even fewer opportunities for training. A key recommendation made by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) to budget for these severe cuts highlighted the need to transform the efficiency of front line staff. The proposed research directly addresses this.

The critical challenges of falling budgets and rising expectations were central to a recent government policy conference in the UK (Policing & Justice for the 21st Century, July, 2013). The UK Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice called for 'greater innovation to maintain standards' as part of his bid to promote recent Home Office policies - 'Making the criminal justice system more efficient' (April, 2013), and 'Helping the police fight crime more effectively' (March, 2013). UK police forces are being encouraged to modernise by adopting new technology, such as body-worn-cameras. These new initiatives are promising, and have every potential to make policing more efficient and effective by speeding up the path to justice, reducing paperwork, and enabling officers to spend more time on patrol. However, digital innovations will also expose the deficits in interviewing and interpersonal communication skills, due to increased transparency and the availability of recordings.

In light of this increasingly difficult policing context there is an urgent need for new and effective evidence-based interview procedures that complement national guidelines on the collection of evidence while also (a) supporting frontline officers, (b) increasing the speed of obtaining evidence, (c) enhancing the quality of evidence obtained, and (d) promoting the success of current and future technological implementation of digital-recording in policing contexts.

The primary aim of the project is therefore to support current and future generations of frontline officers via the development and introduction of a novel 'Structured Interview Protocol', an investigative interview protocol that will efficiently and effectively promote the conduct of ethical best practice interviews to elicit high quality evidence. The protocol will draw upon relevant memory theory and principles of memory, current psychological theory on the strategic control of memory reporting, and cutting-edge psychological developments in investigative interviewing research. It will be developed in collaboration with police-based Knowledge Exchange partners to enhance the success of digitally-recorded interviews, at the same time consolidating and improving front line officers' practice conducting interviews. The College of Policing will provide expert oversight and a quality assurance role. The Structured Interview Protocol will be scientifically validated via controlled experiments and a randomised controlled field-trial. As a whole, the research promises significant impact.

The main objective of the proposed research programme is to produce an evidence-based Structured Interview Protocol that has been developed in the laboratory and robustly tested in the field by police end-users. This innovation is particularly timely due to recent substantial budget cuts in the public sector in the UK resulting in increased individual workloads and fewer opportunities for police training. We anticipate significant impact with respect to promoting transparency and consistency of practice among frontline police officers through the use of the protocol. Our proposed innovation is also timely in light of current police initiatives promoting the use of body worn video. Enhanced transparency and increased professionalism have the potential over time to lead to improved police-community relations and a reduction in police complaints. The successful implementation of our innovation, once subjected to thorough development testing and end-user evaluation in the field, will also result in significant cost savings through more efficient investigatory practice and reduced demand on police resources.

Our primary end-user beneficiaries are therefore police practitioners including frontline police officers and investigative interview trainers. Additional beneficiaries include policy-makers in the criminal justice system such as the College of Policing, and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) National Strategic Steering Group on Investigative Interviewing, whose key aims are to promote evidence-based policy and practice, and to set standards for the police service. For these beneficiaries we expect the primary impact to centre on enhanced policy and procedure surrounding interview skills training for frontline officers via the introduction of an evidence-based Structured Interview Protocol and associated training materials and guidelines. Our police practitioner partners have been fully involved in the development of the project from the outset and are committed to both the concept and its forward implementation.

The proposed research also has potential to achieve significant impact internationally, especially in countries with less advanced investigative procedures. Developing countries, in particular, have soaring levels of both volume and serious crime, coupled with insufficient (sometimes non-existent) training and resources necessary to promote and develop interviewing skills. The rationale underpinning the proposed research is based upon the universal psychology of human memory, meaning that the Structured Interview Protocol will be suitable for use worldwide.

In a wider context, society will ultimately benefit, as high quality, reliable evidence is vital for the investigation process, the pursuit of fair prosecutions, and for preventing miscarriages of justice. As such the current research will benefit society by means of improved delivery of justice and improved police-community relations through transparency and enhanced professionalism.

The research programme will also generate high quality publications contributing to scientific knowledge, and will be particularly relevant for experimental and applied psychology researchers with an interest in memory performance, metacognition, and enhancing the quality and quantity of information provided by eyewitnesses in investigative interviews.

In sum, the research programme has genuine potential to deliver important impacts and benefit (i) police practitioners, (ii) policy makers in the criminal justice system, (iii) society, and (iv) academic researchers, in the UK and internationally.