The Silver Lining: How getting held hostage led me to become an investigative interview specialist and teacher

In this remarkable piece, Project Aletheia Advisory Council member @brucegpittpayne reflects on the development of science-based interviewing training. Bruce strongly advocates for the need for professionalization of the interviewing and interrogation domains, part of which includes training and building skills necessary for this critical endeavor. Many thanks to Bruce for an excellent contribution!

The Silver Lining:

How getting held hostage led me to become an investigative interview specialist and teacher

Bruce Pitt-Payne

I’d like to tell you about the circumstances that motivated me to become an investigative interviewer, and how they became the silver lining to a very dark cloud. 

When I was in RCMP basic training at Depot Division, Regina, Saskatchewan in 1991, I spent hundreds of hours getting yelled at in drill, and about 2 hours learning to interview a witness, and that exercise simply involved writing down what a fellow recruit told me as he read from a script. We left with very little experience interviewing witnesses and weren’t taught anything about interviewing a suspect. I left training knowing how to iron and polish but was only vaguely familiar with what would become the cornerstone of every investigation in which I would become involved. This meant that any interview training would have had to have come from my trainer who, although very knowledgeable, didn’t know much more about it than I did. It was a case of the slightly blind leading the completely blind. I didn’t lose sleep over it though, as I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I was enjoying the bliss of ignorance. It was paradise.

On January 17, 1993; however, I took a bite from the apple and left the Garden of Eden after being taken hostage, and disarmed, by a domestic violence suspect armed with an RPK assault rifle (I’ve heard it referred to as the AK47’s big brother). I was instantly transformed from blissfully ignorant police officer to traumatized witness and had the opportunity to see what it was like to be the centre of an investigation, and a witness in a police interview. Although it caused me lasting mental anguish, it became the best learning experience I’ve ever had. Yes, you did read that right. The silver lining was that it caused me to examine what I had gone through and how I had reacted.

A few hours after the situation ended, I was interviewed in the same manner that I had recently learned in Depot, except I didn’t read from a script. Using pen and paper, a supervisor took down the information I provided in response to the multitude of questions he had prepared prior to the interview. He incessantly raised his hand to my face to signal that I was talking too quickly for his handwriting skills, and often interrupted to ask clarification questions, many of which weren’t required to prove either the actus reus or the mens rea of the alleged offence. He appeared to have been more interested in his own agenda than in what I actually knew. For example, he insisted on having me describe the hostage taker in fine-grain-detail, even though that information had been available elsewhere, considering that I had been the one who had arrested him. Common sense would have screamed that all I had to say to identify him was, “He’s the same person I arrested and had lodged in cells”. The interviewer had not needed me to tell him the hair colour and style, or the colour of the gunman’s eyes. In fact, had he received an education in human memory, the interviewer would have realized that asking the victim of a violent event to describe a person’s eye colour might not generate much detail when that person had been holding a weapon. Had my interviewer known about this “weapon focus”, he might have refrained from repeatedly asking me to describe people and items that had been irrelevant to my survival, and would; therefore, not have been encoded by my distracted, bottom-up, survival-oriented central nervous system. From the trauma-informed perspective, these difficult and unnecessary questions, led me to feel ashamed of my poor recall, a weight I carried for years. Now, my interviewer was not to blame for his shortcomings, as he was simply the product of the training we all had received until the RCMP’s basic training interview curriculum was changed almost two decades later. Here’s why I chose to lead the charge to update the training curriculum, making it realistic and current by convincing the academy to build interview rooms equipped with audio-video and monitoring capabilities.

On a personal level, the hostage event changed me forever and motivated me to dig for answers to the many questions I had about my memory of the event. It also awakened me to the fact that many police officers received inadequate interview training, and that the curriculum itself was far from being founded on scientific research. Much of what was being taught was based on nothing more than anecdotal accounts and pseudoscience. It was as if interviewing was an innate human skill, akin to eating and mating. A drastic transformation was needed; whereby, the “training” would become “education”, without which the quest for information would remain a haphazard exercise requiring little critical thinking. Using the science of memory, much of which had been available since the development of the Cognitive Interview from the 1980s, I believed an investigator would be able to build a repertoire of responses to most interview situations should adequate education and training be received. This would allow for a framework or principled approach that would be a versatile set of phases as opposed to the ubiquitous linear, checkbox process.

I chose to learn from the best scholars and the most knowledgeable practitioners, eventually earning the privilege of teaching investigative interviewing. I accepted that to grow as an interviewer I would have to intentionally walk into rooms where I was the least intelligent and educated person. I continue to learn and adapt; from reading, conducting interviews, and teaching. I still make mistakes and will until I stop being human. As humbling as it can be, I look for new constructs that take me outside my comfort zone, and see them as an opportunity to learn, and encourage all interview practitioners and teachers to do the same. I urge all of you to embrace the adage, “I may fail to learn if I don’t fail, to learn”.