ABSTRACT
In a country as large and diverse as the United States and one with a decentralized criminal justice system, it would be nearly impossible to have an accurate census of investigative interviewing and interrogation practices of all – or even most – American law enforcement agencies. Interrogators across the nearly 18,000 local and state agencies (Reaves, 2011) who conduct the vast majority of criminal investigations operate through some combination of formal and on-the-job training. The formal training that interrogators receive can range from a few hours of in-house training to popular third-party, multi-day courses such as the Kinesic Interview (Walters, 2003), the Reid Technique (Inbau et al., 2013), or WicklanderZulawski and Associates (Zulawski et al., 2001). Even at the federal level, there exists a modicum of standardization across agencies, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation hosting its own training operations at Quantico, Virginia, while other agencies participate in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.1 Unlike other countries that have standardized training and practices in investigative interviewing and interrogation, a uniform American system of interrogation is difficult, at best, to identify.
