Interviewing

Posted by DetectiveEstes in Detective Estes' Corner      No comments

Jun
13

Since this blog is written by a retired police detective, it stands to reason that I’m going to be writing a good bit about police procedure. I teach an interviewing class to police officers called “The 30 Minute Interview”. The class is designed to enhance a police officer’s ability to quickly determine if someone is lying to them and to be able to know how to turn that liar into a truthful person.

During the teaching of this class, I like to promote the idea of producers as opposed to processors. To define those terms; a producer is someone who knows things and tries to turn out a finished product. In the law enforcement arena, a finished product is an arrest with a successful interview and search warrant if appropriate to attempt a conviction of the person that was arrested and recover stolen property or other evidence. A processor is someone who also knows things but because of either timidity or perhaps laziness, the processor sits on their knowledge and only paperwork comes out of them, usually no arrests, successful interviews or search warrants.

The purpose of this post is to give officers encouragement to do interviews. The more that officers have successful interviews the more crimes that are solved. Generally speaking everyone comes away from the interview feeling pretty good as well, even the criminals. (Now, the criminals may not feel good after the court day, but right after an interview even criminals will feel good about doing ‘the right thing’). There will be more posts on interviewing. For now, this post is just a comment of things to come.