Episode 13: High-Stress and Officer Recall

A police officer’s body camera can record the objective reality of an event, but the officer’s recall of the event will often be inaccurate.  Dr. Louise Porter from Griffith University joins the podcast to discuss her research exploring the memory and recall of police officers who are exposed to high-stress events.

Main Topics
-Dr. Porter discussed the perceptual distortions as they related to high stress events. 
-We cover the differences in asking officers to document an incident as soon as possible or providing them with a waiting period before they are interviewed.
-Finally, Dr. Porter will review the findings of her research on how an interview should be conducted to allow an officer the best opportunity to document an incident as accurately as possible.

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Transcript

Welcome to the police and service training podcast. The podcast is intended to help the
police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging policies
and dispel myths of police officer behavior. If you like what you hear, please tell a friend
to subscribe on Apple podcast or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a
moment to review this show. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. As many listeners of this podcast may
have noticed, the few times that I've talked about the topic of officer involved shootings,
I've used the term linear as in an officer involved shooting is never a tidy, nice linear event. In
reality, they can be confusing and chaotic. There is an assumption that a police officer,
because of their training, should be able to recall with videotaped accuracy the circumstances
of the shooting event. It's true that the largest percentage of police academy training involves
the use of deadly force. But as far as I know, the training focuses on accurate shooting,
which only makes sense. And for decades, an officer was trained to hit a paper target at
various distances. It's only recently that some police agencies have utilized shoot don't shoot
simulators, which can mimic some of the stress conditions of a deadly force incident. But based
on what I've reviewed and read, none of the research includes a debrief exercise afterwards.
Officers are trained to shoot, collect their brass and count their points. A few ambitious
researchers have attempted to study the stressful nature of officer involved shooting incidents,
and the accuracy of a police officer's memory and recall of the event. This topic has implications
for several areas of policing, which I hope to touch upon during this podcast. Joining us today
is Dr. Louise Porter, an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Her PhD and master's degree are in investigative
psychology from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. She has worked with law
enforcement agencies both in Australia and other countries on a range of projects for more than two
decades. Her research on policing focuses on police misconduct and the use of force, as well
as police oversight and integrity management. Welcome to the podcast, please. Thank you, Scott.
Happy to be here. Great. Now I've been looking forward to talking to you about your particular
research in this area of memory and recall. First, with your investigative psychology background,
can you give us an overview of what got you interested in studying this topic? Because
it's a challenging area of policing to study. Yes, certainly. So yes, I mean, as you said,
I'm interested in things like police behaviour, police use of force, that kind of thing. But
in terms of my interest specifically in police shootings and officer memory, so I got interested
in that around 10 or so years ago, and it was some circumstances here in Queensland. So there
was actually a spate of police shootings here in Queensland. So that's the state where I live.
So police shootings are actually quite rare here in Australia. And so the coroner actually looked
at those shootings closely in a joint inquest, and they made some recommendations for the
Queensland Police Service. And one was to review their interviewing procedures of involved officers,
but there just didn't seem to be a consensus at that time, particularly regarding interview timing.
And so we saw an opportunity to actually partner with Queensland Police Service,
do some research to help to provide some evidence to support their policy.
Great. Now, as I hinted in the introduction, I personally think this topic has several
implications for policing. Can you offer your thoughts on why this area of inquiry,
without talking about your research, which we will get to, is of value and relevance
to policing, particularly in the United States? Well, I think generally it's important for any
police procedures to be based on a good evidence base. I think this improves confidence about
policing. And that's not just about public confidence, which is obviously incredibly
important, but it's actually officers having confidence in what their agency is requiring
of them as well. And I'd say that this is particularly the case for these sort of high
stakes areas like police shootings, that they can have such huge implications for police,
for communities. So I think an evidence-based approach to interviewing policy can really help
with that sort of transparency and confidence in the process. Specifically though, I think,
trying to improve accounts by officers of events like a shooting is really important because it's
the officer's actions that are going to be judged regarding their reasonableness. And so it's
important to get the best account by the officer about how they perceived the situation, why they
chose to use lethal force. So this can be judged against that reasonable officer standard.
Right. Okay. Now, the paper you had originally written provides information on the argument for
police officer documenting their incident immediately, or the counter-argument was waiting
a few days. Now I've had some conversations with police officers here in the States,
and some of them are quite adamant about the, they have a three-day waiting period. So we'll
just go with that. Now, in a nutshell, could you help us, could you explain the arguments for both
those positions, either interviewing the officer within an hour or two afterwards, again, assuming
safe conditions, or the counter-argument is having them wait two to three days?
Yeah, absolutely. So most of the arguments come from the perspectives of sort of what we know
about memory in general and about the effects of stress on memory. So on the one hand is the
argument that having been through this sort of highly stressful event, memory will be better
once the officer is given a chance to kind of calm down and for the effects of stress or adrenaline
to wear off. And there's also some that argue that sleep actually helps to consolidate memories,
so that waiting at least two sleep cycles will improve memory for the event. On the other hand,
though, there's generally a consensus among memory experts that really interviews should be
conducted sooner rather than later. And this is because what we know about memory generally,
that memories can be forgotten over time. So you might forget details about the incident.
Also, really importantly, because of opportunities for memories to kind of be contaminated from other
sources. So, you know, hearing things from others, seeing things on the news, that kind of thing that
might get in the way. Even just, for example, an officer just kind of rehearsing it over and over
in their own head. Like if you've got gaps in your memory, you try to make sense of those. And so you
can start to sort of fit them in to sort of scripts, like what you think is likely to have
happened in those sorts of events. So the memory can get contaminated. So when it comes to a
shooting, so where we need to know about the officer's perspective at the time to judge that
officer reasonableness, it's really important to get the officer's own account. So when we already
see sort of recognition of contamination problems, the officers tend to get separated from each other
after the incident, that kind of thing, so that they can't speak to each other. So those are the
sort of the two perspectives based on the kind of memory issues. I think that there's also the
officer wellbeing issues on both sides. So obviously there might be welfare issues immediately after
an event that prevent an officer from being interviewed. But also conversely, the interview
itself can actually be seen as this sort of really stressful event. Like the officer is going to be
asked questions, they don't know sort of what's going to happen, the consequences of that.
And so there's also the argument that a lot of them, they just want to get it over and done with.
They don't want to sit there and wait and have that anxiety build up about the interview itself.
You know, that leads me to think out loud here that, and this would vary by department,
you know, across states, there might be different laws and each department might have their own
policies. But it'll almost be like, okay, if I'm in a department with a three-day waiting period,
that a lot of officers have union issues that, not union issues, but they have unions and they
can get lawyers to come out to the scene. You know, it's two in the morning, you're shooting,
and 45 minutes later there's a lawyer there. It almost seems like the lawyer and the officer
should sit down with, even with a three-day waiting period, sit down and just document that
information then, because it would be, you know, confidential between the two of them. But maybe
that'd be a way to work on that. Again, I'm just thinking out loud. I don't know the answer to that.
Other people might make the argument, well, you know, wouldn't that be a legal document that
could be then subpoenaed or something like that? But, you know, not being a legal expert, I just
wanted to throw that out. That's what you made me think of when you said, you know, I want to talk
about this now. Don't make me stop. Now, I also think it's very important to discuss what are
called perceptual distortions as they relate to high stress events. Now, any academic listening
is going to recognize David Klinger's name, and he's written extensively on the topic,
and I'm betting that some law enforcement officers listening to this podcast may have had
perceptual, personal experiences with perceptual distortions such as tunnel vision and audio
blunting. But these can create serious errors when we ask or an interviewer asks an officer to recall
shooting. Can you give us a review of some of the distortions that can be experienced by an
officer during these high stress events? Yeah, sure. And yeah, you're right. I think, you know,
knowing these gives us some good insight into what officers might reasonably be expected to recall
given the stress of the event. So when some of the main distortions reported are things like
particularly tunnel vision is a very common one. So this is about focusing in on certain
details to the exclusion of kind of surrounding details. So like the best example, a very frequent
example is sort of focusing in on a weapon, but not the person holding it, that kind of thing.
So you're very sort of focused, but you can get very, you know, a lot of detail about the
actual weapon. That's what you're focused on. That's where the threat is. But anything around
that is much more fuzzy. Yeah, the face behind the gun. You don't see the face behind the gun.
That's right. Yes. I'm sorry. No, not at all. But yeah, absolutely right. And I think there's
similar things sort of with what you can hear as well as sort of auditory distortions. And so in
a similar way, only hearing certain things and excluding other things, like you might hear very
clearly sort of what the offender in front of you is shouting, but not what your partner over
your shoulder is yelling at you to do that kind of thing. And so having this sort of heightened
sense for some aspects, but then either I wasn't aware that my partner was saying anything, or I
was aware that my partner was yelling at me, but I don't know what they were saying, that kind of
thing. So whereas they could very clearly say that, you know, the offender said this to me.
So auditory sort of distortions. There's also things around time. So time slowing down
is a common one, but then also contrary to that time speeding up for some people. So it's not
consistent. So some people thinking, you know, things happened a lot quicker. Some people think
it was a lot slower. And then just sort of general, people have trouble sort of judging
distances and spatial awareness, that kind of thing, you know, how close they were to an offender
or where they were in relation to other objects, that kind of thing. So those sorts of difficulties
as well. But I think these are distortions about the event itself. But when we spoke
into officers, there's also this sort of can carry on into the kind of right after the shooting,
the way that they describe their mindset after the shooting and how things are kind of unclear
in their mind. And so describing things like their memories being like a sort of a jumble
or a jigsaw puzzle and sort of things flying into their head from all directions and just being that
kind of state of confusion. And so if you think about that sort of coupled with the effects of
adrenaline and anxiety over the investigation, all of those sorts of things, means that officers
are certainly going to be vulnerable to sort of gaps or distortions in their memory.
Right, which is hugely important when they're being interviewed, whether it's immediately or
even later, whether writing it down or it's a conversation, you know, I don't remember is
one of those, you know, strange things. When I worked in Houston, we had a friend and he had been
in the shooting. And so when he came back from his days off, another friend asked him, you know,
how did the gunfire? Did it fire like a howitzer? And the officer said, I actually fired like a 22.
So which was the, you know, there's your example of, you know, a distortion that these at the time
it was a 357. So yeah, I'm that old. But those are small hand cannons. And having somebody
describe it as firing like a 22 is really like, wow, okay, sure. Okay, so let's jump into your
research. Now, in your original study that I wanted to talk about, when I first contacted you,
it was published in 2018. You had almost 90 officers participate in a live action simulation
that this wasn't this it was not a simulation with a video this with these were live people,
live action people. Yeah, that's right. Yes. Great. Now, as we were organizing this and getting it
together, you had mentioned that you did a replication of that study, which I say,
okay, great. This is perfect timing for me to get a hold of you. So can you describe both those
projects? And I'm kind of also interested in how you measured an officer's memory and recall.
Sure, yeah. So, so we were interested in that question of sort of whether officers memory
straight away after an incident is better or worse than an officer's memory a few days later.
And as I said, we had this opportunity to partner with the Queensland Police Service.
And so we use some of their role play training exercises that they were running anyway.
And we used those to then test officers memory for those stressful scenarios.
So in our first study, the scenarios that were actually run out of this old abandoned school,
and like it still had desks in classrooms, that kind of thing lockers, like it was but all,
you know, deserted and have been for a while, it was quite a sort of almost spooky setting,
but you know, very realistic setting. In our second study, they had built a new scenario village,
so purpose built for running these these scenario based training exercises. So they've had
a purpose built furnished house that they used for for these particular scenarios. So
the scenarios and the environments were slightly different across the studies, but the basically
the same that officers had to to respond to some kind of call. They had to search the building,
whether that was the school or the house. And then it ended with an offender appearing and
shooting at the officers with a simulated like simulations firearm. Sure. And then the
officers would then have to respond to that by shooting this role play offender with their
simulated firearms. So simulations like little paint pellets. So they give a bit of a sting,
you know, I've been told, yeah. So yeah, so in both of those studies, so the officers, they went
through those scenarios, and that was their training. So we didn't have much input in that.
But then they, they would come to us and we randomly assigned them to whether we would get
them to recall the event on that same day. So within a few hours, or be in a delayed group
where they would sort of come back and recall the event sort of two days, three days later,
depending on which study it was. So we wanted to compare those groups to see if that timing
impacted recall. And what we also did was those same day group, the people that recorded on the
same day as the event, we actually brought them back as well at that delayed time and asked them
again to recall it so that we could see how their memory changed over that time as well.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's interesting. You people, people fail to realize that,
okay, that was a good way to do this. Okay. What do you remember today? What do you remember a
couple of days from now? Okay. I'm sorry. No, no. So yeah, so, so we could look at the sort of
differences between the officers that had gone through the different time. We could also look
at those within sort of officer differences as well with, with that. Yeah. So there were a few
differences between our two studies, particularly in the way that we sort of tested for memory. So
one major difference is that in our first study, we tested memory accuracy using a set of multiple
choice questions. So these are sort of very easy for us then to compare across officers, you know,
how they got right. And it's very standardized. Everybody gets the same questions, but not
necessarily that realistic in terms of what an officer would actually be asked after a shooting.
They don't, they're not given the options of the answers. So, so yeah, so that's what we did in our
first study was multiple choice questions. So in our followup study, what we did, we had trained
interviewers, like researchers, but trained interviewers who used open-ended questions and
guided the officer through a free recall narrative. So a more realistic interview of the officers.
So that was one, one thing that was different in our second study. Another, or the other sort of
major difference that I'll mention, but won't go into too much detail about is that we actually
included body worn cameras in the design of our followup study, which is really a whole set of
other issues separate to the timing, but I'll mention it because we did it. So in each of our
groups, whether they were right away or delayed, we then had them either watch their video. So they
all wore a camera and then they would either watch their video or not watch their video at the time.
Yeah, that's, and again, without getting off a tangent here, those are the kinds of things that
people don't realize. There's some policy debate in this country about, do you let the officer
look at the camera, the video or whatever, the digital, you know, while they're writing their
report. And I've had the conversation with chiefs up here that, well, if an officer shoots somebody
that has a wallet, and again, the extreme example, and they say it was a gun, if they're watching the
video like everybody else would say, okay, I followed the suspect, he put his hands behind his
back, he wouldn't follow orders. Then he pulled a wallet and I shot him. So I mean, because then,
because that's what you actually have to report is what you saw in the video, which then, you know,
throws out your justification. But if you don't watch the video, then I can, I, if I were writing
the report, I'm documenting, I followed the guy, chased him down and told him to, you know, stop.
He put his hands behind his back and he pulled what I thought was a gun and I shot him. Who knows,
but that gets really complicated. But again, I'm babbling on too much, but I'm really interested
and I think hopefully the listeners are too. What did you find from both studies? Were they
consistent? You know, what, what'd you find? This is great information.
So, so yeah, so, so across the two studies, so as I say, we're able to compare
officers that were interviewed at the different time points. And in our recent study at different
times with or without watching the body worn camera video, and we're able to compare them
for the accuracy of what they recalled as well as how much detail they recalled in those free recall
narratives. So we did a lot of analysis as you can imagine, but I think there's really three
sort of fundamental findings or key takeaways from, from all of this. So the first is that
officers don't remember everything or anywhere close to everything of these events. Like these,
these sort of stressful incidents. And I think that in itself is a really important point because
it's around setting expectations for these officers and their recollections of these events.
So they will not remember all details. They will not mention all details. They won't remember
everything accurately. And there's probably a few reasons for that. And it's, it's actually
difficult to know whether it's because they have forgotten it or because they didn't pay attention
to it and commit it to memory in the first place. So when we go back to thinking about all those
distortions, was it the fact that they didn't, they didn't look at the offender's face because
they were looking at the weapon. So it's not that they looked at the offender's face and they forgot
it is that they didn't see it in the first place, or did they look at it? They saw it, but now they
don't remember it. And it's actually really difficult to then tease those apart. So all we
know is, is what they mentioned and whether that's accurate, but it's very hard to know exactly why
that is. So, so that's the first one. Officers don't remember everything. They don't remember
everything accurately. The second thing is that officers recall of an event. It's going to depend
how you ask them to recall it. And so by this, I mean the sort of the question format. So
because our studies use different ways of getting officers to recall the event, so the multiple
choice questions or the, the narrative, we can see some differences there. So in our first study,
when we asked multiple choice questions, on average, officers got actually less than half
of them correct. And that's when they're actually given the answer options to choose between. So,
as I said, officers do not remember everything. So then that was, that was us then specifying
those questions to them to see if they remembered those specific details. Interestingly, in our more
recent study, so when we gave them that opportunity to give a free recall, so that's when they have
the choice, what they're reporting, we just say, tell us everything you remember about the event.
Again, they reported few details relative to what they could say about an event. So on average,
about sort of a third of possible details, although the realm of possible detail is obviously kind of
infinite, but it was about a third of the details. What they did say though, was actually about 90%
accurate on average. So quite high accuracy with what they freely chose to report. So they didn't
report everything, but what they did report, it tended to be pretty accurate. So I think if we're
talking about memory accuracy, that would suggest that an interviewer can probably have a bit more
sort of confidence or faith in things that an officer freely chooses to recall,
than if they're actually just sort of pressed to give answers to very specific questions that
the interviewer chooses. Okay. So the third finding, I think from these and the final one
that I'll mention. So across the studies, it's the type of information being recalled matters. So
we're asking if timing of interviews matters to memory or if watching body-worn camera matters
to memory. And the answer is, it depends what you want the officer to remember. So in our studies,
we did look at sort of all details, but then we broke it down into different types of detail to
see whether there were differences there. So particularly we looked at details that were
relevant to the threat, like the immediate threat to the officer or the sort of the interaction with
the offender compared to details outside of that. So the more peripheral details, what the furniture
was in the room, what the color of the walls were, these sort of things or things leading up to
actually the offender appearing and then having to interact and then deal with that. So we looked at
the differences between those sort of two types of detail. So what we found was that the non-threat
details and the details outside of that interaction with the offender, those are the things that are
more likely to be forgotten over time. So delaying the interview is not necessarily worse for the
central kind of threat related details, those details of the offender interaction, but it is
worse for those more peripheral details. So if you delay the interview, you're more likely to lose
a lot of that contextual information. So details about the lead up, the environment, things that
I think are still really important for understanding the event and understanding the decision making,
you know, what leads up to that. So yeah, so that's sort of the final finding in terms of
that timing really affects that sort of peripheral information. But there's two things that can help
with that. So one is interviewing early. So as you recall, I said that we had our people
that were interviewed early and then they came back and we interviewed them again.
So those officers, they still remembered the peripheral details at that delayed time. So they
didn't have that forgetting. So the people that weren't interviewed but just came back later,
they'd forgotten a lot of stuff, that peripheral stuff. Whereas the people that were interviewed,
yeah, the people interviewed straight away and then came back, they still remembered the peripheral
stuff. They didn't have that forgetting. So kind of guarded against forgetting those things. And the
other thing, the last thing that I'll mention is about the body worn camera. So the camera helps
with that peripheral information. So watching the video helps that accuracy of those sort of
peripheral details, the details outside the interaction with the offender. But that's the
thing that the issues that that comes with and it's exactly what you were sort of just talking about
there before. The cautions of watching that video and the impact that that can have,
like our research and the research of others would suggest that officers should give their statement
before viewing their body worn camera. If you want to get that officer's perspective
about how they perceived things at that time and explaining what they did. Because once they've
watched the video, that can influence the account that they give, the example that you gave there.
Once they see the video, they know that it's a wallet and not a firearm. But at the time,
they thought that it was a firearm. And so as soon as you introduce that video, you're introducing
extra information. If you want to judge the reasonableness of the officer at that time and
not in hindsight, then don't introduce things that were only known in hindsight, basically.
I remember reading something about if you allow them to view the video first, then they'll focus
on the contents of the video. This might have been something you had written, it might have been from
someplace else. But then what happens is they're so focused on the video, anything that they might
have actually remembered on their own, like you say, contextual peripheral information, they
kind of then lose it because they're focusing on the video so much that they're concentrating on,
okay, what do I see? Not what do I remember? Yeah, that's definitely been shown. So the video
can have those effects. And I think that there's a couple of reasons for that. One explanation is
that it sort of targets their attention to those things. But another explanation is that it gives
them more confidence to report those things. Because the way that they think about the video,
they think about the video as being this, the video must be right, it's this sort of objective
account of what happened, and it must be better than my memory. So therefore, I won't rely on
what I remember. I'll tell you what the camera shows, because that's going to be better. So
they actually choose to report what's in the video because they have more confidence that that's what
happened. Because what they think is, well, you want to know what happened, you don't necessarily
want to know what I think happened, but what actually happened. So yeah, it's complicated.
Indeed. Basically, leave the video out of it until you've got that first statement,
if what you're interested in is that perspective of the officer at the time.
Excellent. Okay, so you've also been quite busy, because again, as we were planning this,
you had mentioned that you had recently published an article where you interviewed officers who had
been through a real shooting about the experiences of the investigative interview process.
In the article you mentioned, because you sent it to me, thank you very much, so I read it,
and I'm paraphrasing here that an officer's account of a shooting relied on memory,
but also engagement in the interview process. Translate that.
Yeah, so this is really recognising that in giving an account, memory isn't just this black and white,
you either remember it or you don't. But there's a context to the interview where it's actually
about the officer's ability and willingness to actually engage in that process and give
their account. And I'm not talking about officers lying or refusing to speak or that kind of thing,
but it's about how you optimise the environment for an officer to give the best account that
they can. And to do that, whether it's two hours later, two days later, they basically need to feel
as much as they can, sort of relaxed and supported so that they can talk openly in that setting.
And so in that particular study, it was interesting because we asked officers about their
experiences, and this was their experience of that interview afterwards, the investigation
in that interview, it wasn't about the incident itself. And we asked them, you know, well,
what do you think matters in getting the best account from an officer in that sort of setting?
And they did talk about some of the issues about timing and logistics of the interview and those
sorts of things that we're studying here, but they also spoke about and seemed most concerned
with how the officers are treated in that process, how they're treated by investigators,
by interviewers, how they're treated before the interview while they're waiting, how they're
treated in the interview when they're having to actually give their account. And so it came out
really strongly that what was important were elements of procedural justice, how they were
actually being treated by these interviewers. So procedural justice being this respect,
trustworthy motives, neutrality, voice. So if the interviewers were respectful,
you know, they treated them with respect, they were respectful in the way that they interacted
with them, that they showed that they had this sort of trustworthy motives in terms of doing
that interview, that they're not out to get them for doing the wrong thing, you know,
because these are internal investigations. And then quite often there's a reputation that some
of these investigators have, you know, in terms of being from internal investigations, oh, they're
all out to get you that kind of thing. And so if they could demonstrate that that wasn't the case,
then that made officers obviously feel a lot more comfortable. Neutrality, so being sort of
non-judgmental, you know, I'm just here to get to the truth. They felt that they were being treated
like anyone would, not sort of any different. And then voice, so this opportunity to actually
have their say, to give their account, to give their account in the way that they want to,
not being interrupted, feeling rushed or pushed to give particular details in a specific way. So
all of these elements, these procedural justice, respect, trustworthy motives, neutrality, voice,
these were things that were really important in making officers feel that they could just
focus on what they were called and give the best account that they could.
Wow, really fascinating. So we've been talking for a while now here and getting some really
great information. So I'd like to wrap it up and give you the opportunity to now get to the
implications. This is what I was hinting at earlier from your research. What are the implications for
police practice, personnel leadership, training, anything like that?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing is just that understanding that officer's memory will
not be a hundred percent accurate, that they won't recall everything. There will be discrepancies
across accounts by different people that were present in the same event. There'll be discrepancies
across multiple accounts if they give multiple accounts, that kind of thing. And I think it's
really important for investigators to know that, but also for the public as well to be informed
about that. And so it's about the sort of reasonable expectations, because if you put high
expectations on officers, then obviously that's going to put them under pressure, but it can also
lead to these sort of accusations that officers aren't being truthful or they're not being complete
in their accounts. And that's somehow, you know, that they're trying to cover up for something
because they're not giving all the information. When actually it's just, it's unrealistic to
expect them to be able to have that high level of memory recall and accuracy for these stressful
events. And from the perspective of memory accuracy, so I think the evidence base points
to not delaying the interview, at least not beyond sort of what's necessary for like immediate welfare
reasons for the officer. I think delaying the interview does risk memory decay, at least
for some of those sort of more peripheral details that are still important. And obviously the fact
that memory can be contaminated as well, and the added stress of the officers,
they don't want to wait either. They just want to get it out of the way, get it over and done with,
at least many that we spoke to anyway. I think that whatever amount of time an officer has to wait,
again, whether it's hours, whether it's days, it's critical that they feel supported
during that time. And that when they are given the opportunity to provide their account, that
it's done through best practice interviewing techniques, allowing them to give that free recall
to just be able to say what they want to say, open questions, and that they feel like they're being
fairly treated by the interviewers. So interviewers being respectful, being sympathetic to their
experience. They understand that they've been through a traumatic event and being neutral,
not being adversarial. And then finally on training. So this would be my last point.
So I think there are a couple of issues for training. More and more we do see scenario-based
training. So these sort of role-play training rather than just the shooting practice at a target.
Obviously that's important. You want them to have a good aim, but being able to actually put those
skills into practice and then make decisions under pressure, those sorts of things. So
we see more of that. I think what could be incorporated into that training, not always,
but some training, is around that investigation process. So scenario-based training of, well,
what happens next? So officers actually understanding then what that process is,
what's going to happen to them? They're going to be separated from their partner. They're going to
have to, how long are they going to have to wait? When they're interviewed, what is that going to
be like? And actually having the practice to be able to sit there and recall an event,
to be able to articulate what happened, articulate the decisions that you made.
I think ultimately all of that is about reducing the uncertainty and having that
knowledge and that skill base. It's really about reducing what we call the cognitive load
on the officers when they're in that interview so that they can basically just concentrate on
giving the best account that they can. Well, this has been fascinating information and I'm
so glad that Dr. Porter was able to join us on the podcast. So I really appreciate your time.
Thank you for all your information. Thank you. You have a great day. Take care. Thanks.