ABSTRACT
Scandinavia consists of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway which are all highly stable welfare societies with very low crime rates and high levels of transparency. Indeed, the three Scandinavian countries do generally have very much in common socially, politically, and culturally. This is true also when it comes to policing, legislation, and criminal investigation practices. When it comes to the practice of interviewing of suspects, however, there appears to be more dissimilarity than one should expect. After some serious public scandals of miscarriage of justice in Norway in the 1990s the Norwegian police service introduced a national program for investigative interviewing heavily influenced by the British process (Granhag et al., 2014). Hence, confession-based interrogation techniques were identified, warned against publicly (Rachlew, 2003), and replaced with scientifically based methods like conversation management and strategic use of evidence (Fahsing and Rachlew, 2009). Interestingly, more than ten years later no similar process of change from within the police service has been identified in either Denmark or Sweden. The present chapter will seek to identify and explore some factors that might explain these apparent differences. It will be held that it is not due to the lack of available and relevant knowledge, nor public scandals in any of the three countries (Fahsing and Rachlew, 2009; Jakobsson Öhrn and Nyberg, 2009; Politiets videncenter, 2012).
