ABSTRACT
M. McConville and J. Baldwin found that in addition to securing confessions, police interrogations served a variety of collateral purposes. These range from recovering stolen property, clearing police books of unsolved crimes and clarifying knowledge possessed by the police. The first category of images derived from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) sample embraces that comparatively small number of exchanges in which the police appear to exert little or no influence over the detainees they question. The PACE sample of cases also suggests an increase in the use of a range of manipulative tactics by the police to secure compliance and or incriminatory material from detainees. This raises the general question of how far the PACE provisions for the contemporaneous recording of formal custodial interrogations have worked to shed light on the previously concealed reality of police-suspect encounters.
