When interviewing witnesses to a crime, police interviewers seek to maximize the amount of information that a cooperating eyewitness can give them so that they can generate leads to follow, confirm or disconfirm alibis, and so forth.
Topic
Three police interview techniques for getting more information from cooperative eyewitnesses: the cognitive interview, hypnosis, and instructed eye-closure.
Framework
Problem/Solution. P1–P3 lay out two existing techniques and what's wrong with each; P4 introduces a third option that solves the problems.
Main Point
Instructed eye-closure is the ideal interview technique because it captures the recall benefits of the cognitive interview without the training overhead, and it works on every witness — unlike hypnosis, which has accuracy and applicability problems. Most Valuable Sentence:
P1: Setting up the problem
Police want to maximize what cooperative witnesses can recall. The cognitive interview is one technique designed to do that.
P2: The cognitive interview — effective but complex
Combines cognitive recall techniques with social-psychology communication skills. It increases details recalled without lowering accuracy, but it's complex, takes long training, and even trained officers tend to drift from the procedure.
P3: Hypnosis — simpler, but less accurate
Less complex than the cognitive interview. But overall accuracy is not improved (and sometimes drops), it produces a "false confidence" effect (witnesses believe their incorrect details too), and not every witness is even susceptible to hypnosis.