May We Tighten the Screws? An Experiment on Public Acceptance of Pressure during Police Interrogations

• In Event: Perception on police methods and legal cynicism

Abstract

Many countries do not have specific rules about the degree of pressure that may be exerted on a suspect, besides a general ban on pressure and regulating excesses such as physical violence. Because a general ban on pressure leaves room for interpretation, in practice police officers often use various forms of pressure that have been shown to increase the risk of false confessions, such as lying or bluffing about the evidence or scaring the suspect into making a statement. While protocols for effective and ethical interrogation such as the Méndez Principles have been developed, in recent years there seems to be a shift in popular opinion toward being ‘tough on crime’ and doing away with ‘friendly’ interrogations. If the public supports such views, the police and prosecutors may take this as support or legitimisation to apply more pressure during the interrogation to obtain a confession. We conducted an experiment to assess the extent to which the public considers different types of pressure during the interrogation acceptable, and whether this is influenced by the severity of the suspicion and whether the suspect has committed similar crimes in the past (guilty bias). We recruited a representative sample of 1500 lay people in The Netherlands and showed them one of twelve vignettes in a 3 (Interrogation Pressure: no pressure, lying about evidence, physical violence) x 2 (Severity of Suspicion: murder, simple assault) x 2 (Guilty Bias: criminal record with similar offences, no criminal record) between-subjects design. The findings of this experiment will shed light on the extent to which the public considers pressure in the interrogation room acceptable, what that means for practitioners and policy makers, and how this relates to the risk of eliciting false confessions from suspects.

Authors

• Annelies Vredeveldt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Jan de Keijser, Leiden University

• Robert Horselenberg, Maastricht University