I know the title does not make any sense, but in honor of Cinco de Mayo, I wanted to provide 5 important elements for effective interviewing:

• Uno: Build rapport. You need to develop an atmosphere of trust with the person you are talking with. If they don’t trust you, do you really think they will tell you everything?

• Dos: Establish their baseline. Their baseline is the behavior (verbal, non-verbal, tone, physiological, etc) that they normally have during communication. This should be developed during the rapport phase while getting them comfortable talking with you. If you don’t understand their own patterns and ways they communicate, how will you identify any changes in their baseline which may need further questioning? 

• Tres: Ask open questions. Most people (investigators included) are conditioned to ask closed, specific questions. Asking open questions such as “Tell me everything that happened” and let them talk without interruption, is much more effective at gathering and assessing information than closed, leading or suggestive questions. Also, probe their story with open questions such as “Tell me more about that…” “What happened next…” “You said XYZ, what do you mean?” etc.    

• Cuatro: Listen. During an interview, many interviewers are so focused on their questions that when the person is answering one question, they are thinking about what they are going to ask next. This causes a lot of information to be missed by the interviewer. It also demonstrates to the person that you are talking with that you are not really interested in what they have to say. Ask open questions and really listen to what they are saying. Then ask follow-up questions based on what they said to dig deeper into their story, develop information and show that what they have to say is important and that you are listening.    

• Cinco: Follow-up. Whether you are talking with a victim, witness or a suspect, follow-up on what they say and try and corroborate their information from other sources. Information from an interview or interrogation often leads to new evidence, but only if you take the time to follow up and follow through.

If you are in law enforcement, join me at the Concord Police Department in Concord, MA on June 11th and 12th, 2015, for training on "Effective Interviewing Strategies"

Guess what day it is? Yeah, it’s hump-day! We start each week not knowing exactly what the week will bring, but by the middle of the week many people start focusing on the weekend. It seems that once we get past the midweek “hump” it’s all downhill from there and we know we will soon be enjoying the weekend!

 

Interrogations work in a similar way. We start the interrogation not knowing the truth about what happened, but at the end of the interrogation we will be enjoying the weekend knowing we got the truth! There is a ‘hump-day” within the interrogation as well, and once we get over that “hump” it’s all downhill from there. What is that hump? Resistance. 

 

A deceptive person has information that they don’t want to disclose for a variety of reasons such as fear of being arrested, fired, or being embarrassed about their actions. There are many other reasons people do not want to tell the truth, but the bottom line is that there is some resistance holding them back. 

 

If you take a person who committed a crime who is being interviewed about it, on a scale from 0-------------------------10, with 0 being they won’t say anything at all, and 10 being a total cleansing of their soul, that person’s willingness to tell the truth is probably not completely at 0 or completely at 10, but rather somewhere in between. Most people want to tell the truth and realize that there are benefits to doing so, but that resistance is holding them back. Maybe they are 20% or 30% of the way there, but not until you get them to over 50% will the scales tip in favor of the truth. Prior to that the weight of that resistance is holding them down. 

 

Once you get them to 51% or more, they are on track to realizing the benefits of being honest and you are on your way to getting the truth. Just like tipping the scales; if there is more weight on one side of the scale, it will tip in that direction. During an interview or interrogation, if more of the weight is on the “unwilling” side, the interviewer should help them realize the benefits of telling the truth, thus putting more weight on the “wiling side.” For more information on overcoming resistance within interviews click HERE.