Rapport‐Building During Witness and Suspect Interviews: A Survey of Law Enforcement

Abstract

Building rapport with adult witnesses and suspects is recommended by major investigative interviewing protocols (e.g., Cognitive Interview and the Army Field Manual in the USA and PEACE in the UK). Although recent research suggests that building rapport can sometimes benefit police investigations by increasing the accuracy of adult eyewitness reports and potentially enhance the diagnosticity of evidence obtained from suspects, little data exist regarding how law enforcement interviewers actually define and build rapport in real-world investigations. To fill this void, the present study distributed a questionnaire containing open and closed-ended questions to 123 law enforcement interviewers in police training courses to determine how they conceptualize and build rapport with adult interviewees. Results indicate that a majority of law enforcement interviewers define rapport as a positive relationship involving trust and communication, with a strong minority defining rapport as a 'positive or negative' relationship. Further, law enforcement interviewers reported building rapport with adult witnesses and suspects in a similar manner, often by using verbal techniques (e.g., discussing common interests via small talk) and non-verbal techniques (e.g., displaying understanding via empathy and sympathy). Theoretical and applied implications of these results are discussed.

Using disclosure, common ground, and verification to build rapport and elicit information.

“…Reluctance in our subjects likely derived from the stigma associated with commission of the illegal behavior, rather than a denial of guilt as might be expected in a legal context. Nevertheless, the current findings are consistent with extant research in experimental interview studies (Evans et al, 2014; Vallano & Schreiber Compo, 2011), and the use of self-disclosure to facilitate common ground with a subject has been widely reported by law enforcement investigators and intelligence collectors (Goodman-Delahunty & Howes, 2016; Russano et al, 2014; Vallano et al, 2015).…”

An experimental manipulation of rapport and moral minimization within a criminal interview.

“…We used theory-based and carefully crafted experimental manipulations of rapport and moral minimization that were delivered with a standardized script to rule out alternative explanations for any experimental effects. And although a longer interaction might have produced more rapport, two manipulation checks showed that our manipulation had strong effects on participants' experience of rapport, a finding that is consistent with evidence that rapport can be established quickly through brief rapport-building sessions, as sometimes occurs in real-world interviews (Vallano et al, 2015). Thus, findings of this study supplement those from field research focusing on the effects of rapport as applied under more natural conditions.…”

Building Rapport in Interviews with Adolescent Trafficking Victims

“…Law enforcement's recognition of the importance of rapport building is consistent with larger bodies of work on effective interviewing of other vulnerable populations (Ahern et al, 2017; Dianiska et al, 2023; Vallano et al, 2015). Yet, simply endorsing rapport building says very little about the precise methods that are or should be used to actually build rapport.…”