Investigating the Truth

Selected Works of Ray Bull

Ray Bull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351690331
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.

The Selected Works of Professor Ray Bull include some of the most influential insights into the psychology of investigative interviewing. Whether it has been determining whether a suspect is lying or telling the truth, enabling children to provide reliable testimony, or understanding how the dynamics of the interview process itself can affect what is achieved, Professor Bull has been at the forefront in researching this fascinating area of applied psychology for over 40 years, his work informing practice internationally. An elected Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the first Honorary Life Member of the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group, Professor Bull also drafted parts of the government's Memorandum of Good Practice and of Achieving Best Evidence on Video Recorded Interviews with Child Witnesses for Criminal Proceedings.

Including a specially written introduction in which Professor Bull reflects on a wide-ranging career and contextualises how the field has evolved, this collection will be a valuable resource for students and researchers of forensic psychology.

1 Evaluation of police recruit training involving psychology

Ray Bull and Peter Horncastle

Introduction

In March 1981, before the disturbances in Brixton and other parts of London, a working party was formed in the London Metropolitan Police with a mandate to examine and to report on all current methods of formal and informal behavioural training for recruits and probationers (i.e. those in their first two years of service) and to make recommendations for improvements in these. From the findings of the working party came recommendations to develop what became Human Awareness Training (HAT). The first version of this training was implemented by the Metropolitan Police in April 1982. In June of the same year the independent evaluation described in this paper began under the auspices of the Police Foundation and at the request of the police. Our evaluation began not only after the training had been designed, but some months after it had been implemented. Thus, a before and after study was not possible. However, such evaluations are rarely organized and conducted under ideal circumstances. Nevertheless, our yearly reports to the London Police were to lead them to amend aspects of the training each year.

“Human Awareness Training” comprises three related areas of training: interpersonal skills (said to embody conversational skills and the ability to manage encounters with others); self-awareness (self-knowledge and insight into one’s effect on social situations); and community relations (embracing awareness of and knowledge about different cultures and subcultures). The training programme, designed by police officers with a background in the behavioural sciences, accounts for approximately a quarter of the initial 20-week training course for those recruited to the Metropolitan Police. Much of the training is practical in its approach, and considerable use is made of such teaching techniques as role-play exercises and video feedback of students’ performance.

The aims of the training (as stated by the Metropolitan Police, in 1985–6) were that the recruit should:

1 reflect credit upon the police force in appearance and behaviour on and off duty;

2 be capable of dealing impartially with people irrespective of background or circumstances;

3 identify how his/her personality affects others;

4 display knowledge of how people are likely to respond in given circumstances;

5 display professionalism in handling and concluding a wide variety of incidents;

6 show skill in recalling events and in helping others to do so;

7 identify the effect of group behaviour upon members of both the police and public;

8 apply a wide variety of interpersonal skills when dealing with members of the public;

9 understand the customs, viewpoints and traditions of minorities;

10 demonstrate flexibility and judgement in dealing with varied situations.

An outline of (phase one) of the evaluation

The behavioural science literature on attitude and social skills training evaluation was reviewed with that on police training to identify appropriate standardized, valid and reliable questionnaires which had been used in similar kinds of situations.

Two groups of recruits (31 per group) completed these questionnaires in Week 1 and in Week 20 (i.e. at the end) of initial training, then again six months and twelve months into their probationary period. The questionnaires used were as follows:

• a social-evaluative anxiety questionnaire (measures social avoidance and distress);

• a self-esteem questionnaire (measures perceived interpersonal threat; self esteem; faith in people; and sensitivity to criticism);

• an interpersonal relations questionnaire (measures need to establish satisfactory relationships; need to control them; and need for affection).

Groups of around 30 officers each answered the questionnaires.

These questionnaires were supplemented by one specifically designed to assess the attitudes, beliefs and behavioural set which the training aimed to inculcate. This instrument, subsequently called the recruit training questionnaire (RTQ), was administered to two groups of officers (n = 30) on the four testing occasions. In addition, data concerning complaints made about the police by members of the public were gathered, as were supervisors’ comments.

Summary of findings (phase one)

Social-evaluative anxiety questionnaire

Police constables have to enter social situations which are often characterized by conflict between the participants or overt aggression. Constables may have to initiate interactions with members of the public in order to control or manipulate their behaviour, often against the other’s will. To manage such social interaction constables need to be able to control the anxiety which such situations engender and be able to put up with the negative evaluations made of them by those with whom they must interact. For obvious reasons police constables must not avoid entering social situations, however unpleasant these situations may appear. The social-evaluative anxiety questionnaire can be used to generate two measures:

(i) the tendency to be distressed and to avoid social situations;

(ii) the tendency to be afraid of being negatively evaluated by others.

With respect to the task of the constable, social distress, avoidance and fear of negative evaluation are prima facie undesirable characteristics, and one of HAT’s aims should be to minimize recruits’ tendencies in these directions.

Officers’ scores decreased progressively and significantly over the testing period (from 13.27 to 7.39). Not only did the above tendencies decline significantly during HAT but they continued to decline during probation. However, the changes during initial training were larger than after it. While it is not possible to identify precisely the cause of this effect from the evaluation design, the utility of the questionnaire is established in this context, and the effect in line with HAT objectives is powerful suggestive evidence.

Recruit training questionnaire

With regard to our own especially constructed recruit training questionnaire, this questionnaire was sensitive enough as a research instrument to generate some significantly different scores between the beginning and end of the study period. However, these changes were often in the opposite direction to that predicted from the training objectives. More recruits, for example, disagreed with the idea that social science concepts would be useful to them at the end of the course than at the beginning. Fewer trainees thought they would try to understand minority viewpoints by the end of training than at the beginning. Likewise, the importance attached to community relations decreased over training. The welfare/service aspect of police work remained important to trainees but declined in importance for probationers once they began operational duties.

One or two beliefs and attitudes changed in appropriate ways. Notably fairness and trustworthiness grew in importance as characteristics of “the good police officer”. But overall, basic attitudes and beliefs remained much the same, and given that the effect of training is being pitted against a lifetime of family and school experience, this is scarcely surprising. On balance it must be said, however, that such changes as we observed were more in line with the expected peer group effect and institutional effect than they were in line with avowed intentions of the human awareness component of the course. The other two questionnaires used (i.e. self-esteem and interpersonal relations) revealed few significant differences over time.

Complaints

How supervisors respond to probationers and how the public respond to them are two crude but vital indicators of the success of initial training. Space prevents mention of our work on supervisors’ assessment, but mention can be made of complaints data. With the assistance of the Complaints Investigation Bureau at Scotland Yard a comparison was made of complaints made against police officers trained under the new system with those trained a year earlier under the old system.

Data on police complaints often reveal a relationship between frequency of complaints and length of service. Consequently, the two samples needed to be matched in terms of length of service. It was found that the HAT-trained officers received 17% fewer complaints per officer, per month of service, compared to the officers trained under the older system. This difference was found not to be due to those officers having, on average, 12 months longer police service. When the complaints data were statistically analysed with regard to the number of complaints per officer, per month of service, the difference in these two sets of data would have occurred by chance in only eight out of 100 occasions. Thus, the 17% reduction in the rate of complaints was probably not a chance finding but seems likely to have been a result of the training, as this was the major factor consistently differentiating the two groups of subjects. While tying this reduction to HAT specifically is problematic, HAT, which emphasizes the discretionary role of the police officer, at least cannot be said to increase the probability of officers so trained incurring complaints.

Phase one conclusion

It was our recommendation that the Metropolitan Police’s recruit training programme in human awareness was a worthwhile achievement of considerable substance and promise. However, we were concerned by whether the achievements of the initial training were to some extent dissipated by post-initial training experiences. Now that the force’s initial recruit training in HAT appeared to be operating with considerable efficiency it seemed appropriate to determine the extent to which the effects of this training were manifested in constables’ policing behaviour.

Partly in the light of the information presented so far, the Metropolitan Police agreed to fund a second phase of the evaluation. This second phase examined the extent to which officers were putting HAT skills into practice on the street. By this time the title of the training has been changed from Human Awareness Training to Policing Skills Training (PST).

Phase two of the evaluation

Three components for the phase two evaluation were agreed upon:

1. Psychometric evaluation

Four valid and reliable questionnaires were completed by officers at the end (week 20) of initial training and then again 20, 40 and 66 weeks later. These week 40, 60 and 86 testing dates coincided with the completion of the Street Duties Course (Part 1), the Street Duties Course (Part 2) and Continuation Training Classes (Part 2) under the then-current probationer training programme. The questionnaires used were as follows (with the first three having been used in phase one):

• a social-evaluative anxiety questionnaire;

• a self-esteem questionnaire;

• an interpersonal relations questionnaire;

• a self-monitoring questionnaire (measures amount of self-observation and self-control).

These four questionnaires were completed by three cohorts of 40 officers. Additionally, one other questionnaire was used which we specifically designed to assess the attitudes, beliefs and behavioural set which PST aimed to inculcate, especially those attitudes concerned with the use of discretion in police work. This instrument, subsequently called the district training questionnaire (DTQ), was administered to two groups of officers (61 in total) on the four testing occasions. (The DTQ was based, in part, on the recruit training questionnaire employed in phase one.)

As with the first phase of the evaluation, it was not possible to use police recruits as controls. As scores were obtained over time. subjects acted as their own control and, provided the training had a systematic effect, then scores over time should have exhibited some significant and coherent pattern of change.

2. Patrol observation study

In order to examine the utility of PST in the field a sample of 64 police officers with between 18 and 43 months service (i.e. those who received PST after most of the authors’ phase one recommendations had been implemented) were accompanied on patrol on one or more days by one or two trained observers. This observational evaluation took place in each of eight police stations which together formed a representative sample of policing opportunities in London. Observations were made according to our specially designed schedule containing some 89 data scales. Observers recorded data on 550 police officer–citizen encounters. On some occasions two observers accompanied an officer on patrol. This was for two reasons. One was to gather data on the inter-judge reliability of the behavioural observations and the other was to conduct the third component of the evaluation: interviewing the participants of encounters.

3. Interviewing the participants of encounters

On fifty occasions observers conducted interviews with a constable and with an encountered member of the public (separately) once an encounter had finished. The questionnaires used for these interviews were concerned not only with the respondents’ view of the behaviour objectively recorded (but not disclosed) by the observers, but also with matters which may be important in police–citizen encounters which were not easy to observe objectively (e.g. inner feelings).

Summary of findings (phase two)

1. Psychometric evaluation

Officers’ scores indicative of distress, avoidance and fear of negative evaluation by others in social situations decreased progressively and significantly during the period over which we tested them (from 14.81 to 9.74). (A similar result was reported in phase one.) These findings are in line with the aims of PST. However, at the end of the initial twenty-week training, phase two officers’ scores on these dimensions were higher (and hence less in line with the aims of PST) than phase one officers’ scores had been at the same point in their training (14.81 vs. 10.33). Such a finding might indicate a deterioration in training standards.

As we found in phase one, the other extant psychometric questionnaire revealed very few significant changes.

On the district training questionnaire, like the phase one officers, the phase two officers had some favourable at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Evaluation of police recruit training involving psychology
• 2 Recall after briefing: television versus face-to-face presentation
• 3 Isolating the effects of the cognitive interview techniques
• 4 Does the cognitive interview help children to resist the effects of suggestive questioning?
• 5 The enhanced cognitive interview: expressions of uncertainty, motivation and its relation with report accuracy
• 6 Child witnesses in Scottish criminal trials
• 7 A state of high anxiety: how non-supportive interviewers can increase the suggestibility of child witnesses
• 8 The investigative interviewing of children and other vulnerable witnesses: psychological research and working/professional practice
• 9 True lies: police officers’ ability to detect suspects’ lies
• 10 Helping to sort the liars from the truth-tellers: the gradual revelation of information during investigative interviews
• 11 Maximising opportunities to detect verbal deception: training police officers to interview tactically
• 12 What really happens in police interviews of suspects? Tactics and confessions
• 13 Examining rapport in investigative interviews with suspects: does its building and maintenance work?
• 14 Police strategies and suspect responses in real-life serious crime interviews
• 15 What is ‘believed’ or actually ‘known’ about characteristics that may contribute to being a good/effective interviewer?
• Index