Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Training for Police Investigations

Trauma-informed interview training can help street-level police officers and investigators when interviewing sexual assault victims.  The training applies a victim-centered approach for understanding how trauma impacts memory and behavior.  Dr. Bradly Campbell discusses his research that evaluates the effectiveness of Trauma-informed interview training.

Main Topics

•Sexual assault myths can negatively impact an officer’s understanding of a victim’s interview response
•Trauma-informed interview training skills can be applied to other police-citizen interactions
•Trained actors may be a necessary approach for realistic police scenario-based training.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
I often wonder if it's tedious for listeners when I mention my own experience in policing,
but today I think it's important.
When I went through the police academy in Houston, I was exposed to a grand total of
six hours of training for sexual assault investigations.
Six.
In my exploration of topics to discuss on this podcast, I was pointed to an article
titled,
Effects of Trauma-Informed Interview Training for Police Sexual Assault Investigators on
Knowledge and Behavior, a Randomized Experiment Using Standardized Actors.
Trust me, it's better than it sounds.
Like any good research article, the authors provided some type of background information
for their study.
As I was reading, the study mentioned some data from the United States Census of State
and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies.
This is the survey done every three or four years that documents the types of academy
training in the United States.
According to the most recent census information, the average amount of sexual assault academy
training in the U.S. is now, wait for it, seven hours.
I want to be clear, I do not know if my six hours of training in Houston 40 years ago
was an average, as the academy census only started in 2002, so it's impossible to know
the average from the 1980s.
Still, only seven hours of training in sexual assault investigations opens up a lot of questions.
Joining the podcast today to help understand some of the questions I have about sexual
assault training is Dr. Bradley Campbell.
Brad is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisville.
He is also a faculty member with the Southern Police Institute, an advanced education and
training institute, whose mission is to enhance the professional development of law enforcement
practitioners.
Dr. Campbell works directly with police agencies to test new ideas, evaluate programs, improve
training and develop realistic scenario-based exercises that prepare officers for the challenges
they face in the field.
Thanks for coming on the podcast, Brad.
Thanks, Scott.
I'm really happy to be here.
I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
When I was looking at your past research, I always try to look at people's history.
I saw that you had studied or you had examined the notions of de-policing, the war on cops
and procedural justice.
But there were quite a few that dealt with sexual assault investigations.
Can you give the listeners an overview of why you became interested in this area of
policing?
Sure.
So when I was in graduate school, I worked on a project led by Bill Wells that was examining
the problem of unsubmitted sexual assault kits in Houston, Texas.
That project was focused largely on the use of DNA from sexual assault kits in investigations
overall.
But a portion of that project involved me and other graduate students going down and
interviewing sex crimes detectives about investigations, how they prepare and what could improve their
responses to sexual assault survivors.
One of the things that we learned was that most investigators said they wanted more formalized
training on sexual assault investigations.
And that kind of sparked my interest in training for this type of crime in general.
And then when I came to Kentucky and I started working at the University of Louisville back
in 2015, 2016, the state of Kentucky was beginning to focus on their untested sexual assault
kits.
Okay.
I joined those efforts as the lead research partner.
And a part of my work focused on evaluating a new training program that was developed
by Jim Root from the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training, where they were
teaching basic overall sexual assault investigations.
And since that time, I've partnered with Jim to evaluate a total of five variations of
training.
Oh, okay.
Very good.
So that leads naturally to the next question.
Why is this area of inquiry, and what I mean is the interview training, why is that relevant
or valuable to the police?
So it's very, very important because sexual assault investigations are some of the most
complex and high stakes cases that officers respond to.
Survivors in these cases experience trauma, very acute trauma that's similar to an attempted
homicide.
And that trauma can affect their memory, their communication, and their behavior in ways
that could be misunderstood if officers aren't trained to recognize it.
So research on trauma-informed responses can show kind of that understanding them amongst
officers can help them gather more and accurate information, and it can help victims have
a better experience while they're interviewing with investigators.
Right.
I've actually had the, I say, displeasure to do a couple of those interviews years ago,
and there's just, you know, there's nothing to compare them to.
So I'm not going to even try.
And I have to start when we talk about your research by asking about the training hours
you mentioned in your paper.
If officers are getting only seven hours of training, is that enough?
So that's a good question, and those numbers from the CLITA survey, seven hours might seem
like a small chunk of training, or it might seem like a large chunk of training, depending
on your perspectives of training programs.
But kind of the challenge with those seven hours on average in a police academy is that
training's got to cover a wide range of topics.
So it's going to be legal aspects of a sexual assault case, evidence collection, what victim
services are available, how to write a report, and investigative procedures.
And when you spread it out across all of those different areas, there's often a very limited
time to talk about trauma, how that trauma can affect victims who are reporting.
So the issue isn't always kind of the number of hours, but potentially how it's allocated
and what they focus on.
Yeah, that was, I'm sorry, that was something that, not the sexual assault training, but
a couple of weeks ago, I had Gene Paulina, and he was talking about the same kind of
thing when it came to, it's just not, don't just look at the number of hours, you have
to dig deeper.
But unfortunately, the survey can't do it.
I apologize.
Continue.
Oh, no, you're fine.
So the thing that I was going to say is over the last 15, 16 years, we've seen a lot more
agencies actually focus on additional sexual assault training to try to get more information
outside of just the academy level instruction.
OK, so something else that came to mind as I was reading, and I've read this in other
locations, others have argued that the volume of training a person gets, seven hours, 10
hours, 100 hours, the volume of training can translate into the how it's seen as as
importance.
Maybe this is why crime fighting is seen as a key role in policing.
They do get tend to get a lot of that.
Is it possible for the lack of sexual assault training to signal its importance on the street
is not that important?
So, you know, police have to learn several things.
So it's kind of difficult to to find sufficient hours for every single topic.
But for me, and one of the things that I try to get out there is that for trauma informed
sexual assault training, I think that people should spend more time on it because for four
main reasons.
For one, trauma informed training is going to help improve victim experiences, improve
victim experiences, are going to translate to more engagement with investigations, which
can improve case outcomes.
Right. Sure.
And increase victim perceptions of police legitimacy.
The third reason is responding to crime victims is crime prevention.
Right. So holding offenders accountable can prevent them from committing future crimes
for not just sexual assault.
But Rachel Lovell up at Cleveland State University has done some work showing that sexual
offenders commit a bunch of other crimes as well.
And finally, this type of training for sexual assault victims can really translate to other
responses on the job.
So if every crime has a victim learning about trauma informed techniques, it's going to
help somebody talk to domestic violence survivors.
It's going to help people talk to a robbery victim or a burglary victim or anyone who's
experienced trauma.
If we teach them these types of skills, they can apply them across the board.
It's almost I'm reminded, as you speak, almost of the training and procedural justice,
you know, not just when I pull somebody over, I can be, you know, polite and kind, kind
can apply so many different other areas.
So, OK, very good.
Now, you do mention this in your paper, but I think it's important to expand on this a
bit so people can hear it.
What are some of the common misconceptions about sexual assault crimes?
So common misconceptions, they're usually called rape myths or rape myth adherence.
And some of those misconceptions would be that the majority of cases are going to involve
a stranger who uses force or a weapon and a victim who sustains injury and verbally
or physically assaulted or physically resisted the assault.
Other examples would be misperceptions that survivors are going to report immediately
or be visibly upset while they're reporting or they'd be able to recall all of the details
that occurred in order from beginning to end of the incident.
Kind of in reality, most cases don't meet those expectations.
For example, most most survivors know their offender.
Most cases don't involve a victim or involve a weapon.
Victims could be emotionally expressive.
They could have flat affect while they're reporting or a whole range of emotions while
reporting. And for some victims, neurobiological responses can cause freeze responses
that prevent them from sustaining visible injury or resisting an attacker or from recalling
information in a linear format.
OK, again, you know, when you speak these things out loud, I'm reminded of a few other
things like you had mentioned the distortions, somebody who might, you know, the stress and
trauma like a police officer in a traumatic situation, an officer while shooting often
doesn't remember everything from the incident.
So, you know, maybe that's something to have people keep in mind them when they're dealing
with these kinds of incidents.
So what are some of the potential problems with poor training?
So one of the potential problems with poor training would be that it's going to impact
crime victims in a negative way.
So, for example, the justice system in a sexual assault case automatically causes
re-victimization or re-traumatization because they're going to have to describe that
attack at multiple stages of the justice process.
So even in kind of unintentional cases where an officer might not be trained, that maybe
a lack of compassion or asking questions in a way that makes the victim feel blamed, it
can cause them to withdraw from the justice system.
The other the other problems that come from it are Kathleen Lorenz has done some work
on basically procedural justice in sexual assault investigations.
And what her work shows is that if officers treat victims well, crime victims are more
likely to stay engaged in the process, which is the number one predictor of arrest and
prosecution. In the current investigation, they're most likely to stay involved.
And they also say that they would report to the police again, and they refer others to
report to the police if they're treated in a procedurally fair way.
When they're not treated well, the opposite is true.
OK, so your study will get into that more in a second.
Your study is going to focus on trauma informed interviewing.
Can you explain this approach?
It seems reminiscent, again, a lot of what you're writing is reminiscent of other things,
but this seems similar to something I've been learning about lately.
It's science based interviewing and that science provides a foundation for improved
tactics and policing.
Sure. So it is it is similar to science based interviewing and draws on some of the same
concepts. And I think that a thing you mentioned earlier was likening the response for
sexual assault victims to police officers who were involved in a critical incident.
So one of the things that we do to make the message resonate is we'll start our training
now by saying by tying trauma informed responses and trauma informed interviewing to
what we would want to have for an ideal response for police after a critical incident,
like a police shooting.
So, for example, the trauma and stress experienced by police officers in police shootings
are very similar to what a victim is going to experience.
OK, so with those responses, we want them to be very similar.
So, for example, after a shooting, best practice would allow an officer some time before
making a sworn statement.
It would assign kind of an advocate or a peer to help guide them through the process.
They might get legal assistance or psychological sources, resources that are going to
help them with their well-being from a trauma informed approach.
We want the same thing to be applied for victims.
And then once we kind of get that baseline of connecting the two, then we can start to talk
about trauma informed responses, which largely draws on kind of the four R's from SAMHSA
or Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's approach to trauma informed
practice for social work or counselors and things along those lines.
And those four R's are realizing the widespread impact of trauma, recognizing the signs and
symptoms of trauma, responding to those individuals by integrating that knowledge into
policy and practice and working to resist retraumatization.
So for policing, that would mean we want to understand how trauma can affect how victims
remember and communicate details about an incident.
So they might recall things in fragments, struggle with chronology, have different
emotional responses when when talking about details.
And if officers aren't familiar with those, they might say that doesn't match kind of
societal definitions of what a sexual assault victim would look like when they're reporting.
So with trauma informed interviewing, it's like I said, it's similar to science based
interviewing. For the classes that we teach here, Jim Root focuses a lot on cognitive
interviewing, which is an evidence based method that's been around for 40 or 50 years
now. Designed to improve memory retrieval and it emphasizes things like open ended
questions, allowing victims to describe events in their own words, avoiding leading
questions, giving people time to recall details and kind of asking questions in a way
that supports both the victims, so they're compassionate, open ended questions, and it
also improves the quality of information that investigators receive.
OK, excellent. Oh, so let's jump into your study.
What was your fundamental research question and how how did you go about collecting some
of the data for it? So overall, what we wanted to know was if we trained officers how to
interview, if they would use those skills.
So what we decided to do is we created a lecture based training coupled with standardized
actors. And this kind of method is common in the medical field.
Basically, what they do is they'll train performers, standardized performers, standardized
actors to portray patients with real symptoms and real problems that allows their course
content to build kind of to an interaction or a capstone.
So they're learning about how to diagnose symptoms or understand a problem a patient
may be having. The actors are going to follow kind of a script that's based on real cases,
real symptoms, real problems, and based on how the medical professional asks them
questions. So let's say if they have good bedside manner, they get more information.
If they have bad bedside manner, they get less information.
And then the actors will give the medical professional feedback on based on course
objectives and their own feelings as a person.
So we adapted that model to our training program to teach the officers the skills and
then allow them to practice before they went out in the field.
Overall, we had 113 officers attend our training.
It was funded by NIJ, so we were able to do eight training programs over two and ended
up being three year period because of COVID.
Control group officers did an interview both before and after the training and treatment
group officers completed an interview after the training program.
So we compared control groups day one interviews to treatment groups, kind of post
training interviews, and we graded them using a rubric of trauma informed techniques.
And so the results, what did you find?
So overall, what we found was that training was effective.
We had survey outcomes and we found that the training improved officers knowledge of
trauma informed techniques, which was excellent news in both short and long term
outcomes. It also improved their confidence to conduct interviews, which we know that if
people feel more confident to do things, they're more likely to do them in the field.
And then in terms of the interview, the simulated interviews or the scenario based
interviews, we also found that officers in the treatment group were significantly more
likely to use trauma informed techniques that are able to get information from the
actors. And their interviews were longer, which meant that they were expressing
patients and things like that that we would expect in a trauma informed interview as
well. I think that some of the other interesting things about it are it was a
statewide project, so we weren't able to go out into the field and observe every officer
because they came from multiple agencies.
Sure. This could be hard to do even in one agency, but sure.
Yeah, but we would do we did long term follow up surveys.
We had open ended responses, so we would have officers saying that they were using the
skills in the field that was helping them.
And one of the the best things that we would get would be an email from an advocate or
an officer saying that an interview went really well.
So that was kind of some evidence from the field that they were going out and using
those things and it was having a good impact.
Did you solicit those or did those just come in on their own?
Those are just come in on their own.
So Jim Root, the instructor from DOCJT, would get emails.
I got some from from victim advocates saying that interviews went well and things like
that. Nice. I don't know if you mentioned it.
How long was the training for this?
Was it like eight hours?
Oh, so my days.
Yeah. So the trainings, it's 40 hour training over five days.
And it met in Kentucky, their annual in-service training.
OK, very good. So yeah, there's, you know, for 40 hours right there beats the seven
hours on the which is the average.
Now, again, you're right, academies have to be selective these days.
They they've grown and grown and grown in the number of hours.
But sometimes these are the kinds of things that you really need to consider
adding to your training, even if it makes it unfortunately another week.
The benefits that might come from this might might be, you know, cost effective.
So based on your research and maybe that's where I'm going right now, can you identify
two or three implications for the police practice, their training or even just police
administrators? Sure.
So from this training, one of the things that I think is really important is the
training can work and it can improve officers' knowledge and confidence, which I
think is very important.
Another thing that that was very interesting is that officers, in our case, really
enjoyed working with actors.
We partnered with the University of Louisville's theater arts department.
Rachel Carter is a professor over there.
And then Ted Carter works at Bellarmine University now, but he works for SPI as
well as a standardized actor trainer.
And their scenarios were very realistic and officers were asked on the survey
afterward to rate kind of how realistic those scenarios were to them.
And they so the question was based on my experience with crime victims, the
simulated interview was realistic and we out of a total of six, we received an
average of five point seven five for officers in our study.
So they're saying that these were realistic experiences and they enjoyed being
able to get feedback from the actors who didn't have police experience.
So these are our theater students or actors from the community with no policing
background who get to come in and say, based on this interaction, you know, when
you ask that question, it kind of made me feel blamed or it made me feel like you
believed me.
And they could give that feedback to an officer directly after the mock interview
and the officers could take that and incorporate it in their future practice.
You know, that's interesting.
I'm going to jump in for just a second, just out of curiosity, because I was
talking with another guest a week or two ago about the use of virtual reality.
It's part of training.
And then there's I haven't talked to anybody formally, but we kicked around the
idea of the the simulators, the video large wall or semicircle, you know,
simulators. So here's another approach.
Now, the question I have is, OK, how many how many trained actors did you need?
So they did roughly five to 10 worked on the project overall.
OK, so they were they were from the from from the college or they were students.
Yeah, so we had theater students and then some some came from the community
theater groups as well.
So did you have to pay them?
Because, again, very often of research, research gets done because it gets funded.
Now, you're looking at somebody who got funded at a grand total of all these
years of six thousand dollars.
That's it. That's all the grantee I ever got.
So were they volunteering the course of course credit or how that work out?
So they they were paid.
We were able to pay them on the grant thirty dollars an hour.
OK, and we paid thirty because some of these trainings were four hours away
from Louisville and we were able to to compensate them for their time on that.
So there is a cost to paying the actors.
But I think that it's very worth it if you can if an agency could pay for, say,
an instructor to teach the topics and then to have these actors who are trained
and able to portray realistic scenarios.
Yeah, the other thing you mentioned, I was reminded of, you know, there's a little
bit of play acting when we were in the academy trying these things, but you're
standing across from another police recruit and you know who the person is,
whether it's a female or not, you know, their race, it doesn't matter.
You know the person, you've known them for months, so you're not going to treat
them the same way as a stranger who's standing there acting like a victim.
Yeah, so and that was one of the great things about this training is
with that partnership with Theatre Arts, we were really able to make it seem like
it was a realistic interview, so they would read the report before they went in.
They knew the details and they were doing a detailed follow up interview
with that individual.
So they walk in and they treat it exactly like an interview.
And some officers were nervous, you know, it felt very high stakes for them,
even though it's a low threat environment to practice those skills.
And they were able to get a lot out of it.
Yeah, that's again, you're saying things that just maybe it's doing these podcasts
after a long period of time, you can start hearing the same things.
The the reality of the videos or the simulators or the realities of the virtual
virtual reality, you know, it just puts it raises their blood pressure,
raises their heart, you know, and so they're feeling stress going in.
I suppose that's a good thing.
Now, we do have about 10 minutes left.
Is there anything you wanted to cover that we might have missed?
So two things, I guess.
One of the interesting things as well is that I feel like
having this type of training where actors can go in also
kind of gives a different perspective of policing to people who might not normally see it.
So actors, Rachel Carter, again, from Theater Arts at UofL,
did basically focus group interviews with the actors.
And one of the things that they were excited about was being able to use
their skills to help police officers and help victims.
Sure. And it also shows them kind of the behind the scenes
challenges that police officers face.
And they get to see real officers trying to do their
their best to improve skills and show vulnerability.
So that was an interesting, interesting program.
And there's a program in New York that uses actors and interactions
with police officers to try to build relationships and kind of show
different perspectives to officers and to the public.
So I thought that was an interesting kind of sidebar from the training.
And the other thing that we're doing is in Kentucky now
through BJA funding, we were able to offer free training programs.
So we have a 24 hour version of this 40 hour class
where, again, DOCJT, Jim, he teaches them
trauma informed interviewing and they get to practice with actors.
There's an eight hour class that
doesn't have actors in it that that's teaching trauma informed interviewing.
So we're evaluating all of those to see if shorter programs
can kind of meet a broader audience and have the same outcomes.
Well, this, Brad, this was this was great information.
I really appreciate it.
I think listeners are going to get a lot out of this one.
Awesome. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it.
And thanks for coming on the podcast.
Yes. Thank you very much.
All right. Have a great day. You too.
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