Capturing the scene: efficacy test of the re-enactment investigative instruction
Abstract
Purpose
As eyewitnesses provide the most valuable information for criminal investigations, it is important to further develop and test techniques for collecting eyewitness testimony so that they meet the major objective of a police interview: obtaining details pertaining to criminal actions. The purpose of this paper is to test a new instruction – the re-enactment investigative instruction – formulated to collect the most fine-grained details of a criminal event as accurately as possible. It leads the interviewee to decompose all directly recollected actions into the most minimal actions so that the event can be accurately re-enacted.
Design/methodology/approach
In all, 40 participants individually viewed a video depicting a robbery, were randomly assigned to a re-enactment or structured interview (SI) group and then interviewed face-to-face. Each interview was comprised of two free recall phases and a questioning phase. Manipulation of the re-enactment instruction took place in the second free recall phase of the re-enactment interviews (RIs).
Findings
The RI elicited more correct information compared to the SI (d=1.14), and slightly but not significantly less incorrect information (d=0.09). Participants in the RI condition reported significantly more details pertaining to general and specific actions.
Practical implications
The re-enactment instruction shows the potential to increase witness recall in a way that promotes recall of both additional correct information and investigative-relevant information.
Originality/value
The instruction provides witnesses a retrieval strategy that facilitates overcoming both the gap between memory availability and accessibility and the gap between memory availability and output regulation, eliciting more details with no significant increase of errors.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Jean Claverie for his contributions to data collection. This paper was professionally proofread by M. Neff-Heinrich, a native English speaker who specialises in English-for-the-sciences. The authors are grateful to her for her comments on this manuscript.
Citation
Launay, C. and Py, J. (2017), "Capturing the scene: efficacy test of the re-enactment investigative instruction", The Journal of Forensic Practice, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 174-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFP-02-2015-0012
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited