In 1989, five young boys were found arrested and charged for the sexual assault, battery, attempted murder on a 28-year-old jogger in Central Park in a case that would eventually shake America to its foundations after their exoneration in 2002. When interviewed about their experiences on the police interrogation, one member of the now-exonerated Central Park Five said this about their experience:
“We were delirious with hunger. We were delirious, because time was passing and we didn’t know what time it was, just a whole nightmare of the whole situation and I think what happened is, after a certain point, you break and in the breaking point, you say anything that will allow you to get out of that.”
It can be hard to believe that innocent people would ever confess to a crime they didn’t commit. However, intense, coercive police interrogation methods, held in an unfriendly environment, have been shown to bring about such negative outcomes. The case of the Central Park Five is one such example among many about how the interrogation methods of the police can lead to false confessions.
According to the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization that works to free the wrongly convicted, those who end up falsely confessing are often interrogated for up to sixteen hours before they crack under pressure. The primary interrogation method used by American law enforcement is known as the Reid Technique, which consists of three parts: factual analysis, which is where suspects are evaluated with the details and observations of the crime scene itself to establish probable guilt or innocence; the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI), a non-accusatory interview that attempts to spot behavioral cues to determine falsehood; and the interrogation itself, which possesses nine steps in its process to elicit a confession from the suspect.
Some aspects of the interrogation portion of the Reid Technique, makes strong assumptions about the behaviors of innocent people. For example, one of the nine-steps of the Reid Interrogation Technique provides details on how to handle suspects potentially asking to speak because they want to deny the accusations. The Reid Technique instructs interrogators not to allow them to do so because innocent people are “less likely to ask for permission and more likely to “promptly and unequivocally” deny the accusation.”
This and the fact that the basic premise of the Reid Technique’s interrogation steps begins with telling “the suspect that the evidence demonstrates the person’s guilt,” is why researchers have been labeling the popular interrogation method as one that presumes the suspect is always guilty.
With the basic premise of presuming that a suspect in interrogation is guilty, it can be easier to understand why the Central Park Five ended up falsely confessing. In reality, the interrogation of the five was never recorded, but it’s stated that the police lied to the boys about possessing evidence, kept them for hours without the presence of a guardian, and even resorted to beatings to get the confessions they wanted.
Researchers in the field of law and psychology have made serious questions about the pseudoscience that backs the Reid Technique’s assumptions of what constitutes the behavior of an innocent or guilty person. Some of their concerns are about the Reid Technique’s coerciveness because exonerations have been shown that false confessions are more common, making up 15-25% of all false confessions and are often causally linked to coercive interrogation techniques and interviewee vulnerability to interrogation.
Some researchers have conducted experiments using a persuasive interrogation method likened to the Reid Technique, and another dialogue-based interrogation technique and found that the persuasive technique had far more people confessing falsely to something that they did not perform.
Furthermore, another significant flaw that researchers question about the effectiveness of the Reid Technique is in its applicability to children. Researchers involving police officers in their study, separated by those who are trained in the usage of the Reid Technique, have found that those who do use the interrogation method are less sensitive to an adolescent’s age and more likely to utilize methods that include false evidence and deceit and are psychologically coercive.
It’s no surprise then that the Central Park Five confessed under such intense circumstances, with the police lying to them and keeping them trapped to force them to feel a certain burden. Perhaps if a different interrogation method had been utilized, one that does not presume guilt or facilitates coercive interrogation techniques, these five young boys would not have been sentenced to prison, losing a decade of their life, during the important transition from youth to adulthood.
Which leads me to introduce a dialogue-based interrogation method known as the PEACE method which is made up of five stages: Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, and Evaluation.
The PEACE method begins with non-accusatory information gathering on the incident, trying to determine who needs to be interviewed and preparing, followed by trying to build rapport and engage with anyone who is being interviewed, while addressing any anxieties they might have. This is swiftly followed by taking a full account of what the subject remembers from the event without interruption. Then the interviewer summarizes what was said to get full closure that everything that needed to be discussed was done so. Then, the police evaluate the information they received from the interview within the broader context of the incident.
This method is utilized in many countries such as the U.K., New Zealand, and more as an alternative to the Reid Technique outside of the United States.
Researchers suggest that American police interrogators adopt the PEACE Method, which has been shown through experiments to coerce less false confessions while maintaining the same levels of true confessions. This study found that persuasive interrogation methods like the Reid Technique, while boasting a similar rate of true confessions of 90% compared to a dialogue-based method similar to the PEACE method, has a 40% higher rate of eliciting false confessions.
In order to maximize the number of true confessions while reducing the potential for false confessions and wrongfully convicting someone of a crime they did not commit, we need to look for alternatives to our current interrogation methods, which could go a long way for changing public perception of the police and most importantly, preventing innocent young men like the Central Park Five from being sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit.