If high-risk decisions deserve review, high-risk interview methods do, too.
by Stan B. Walters
The Risk We Can See
Officer-involved shootings and use-of-force incidents receive a great deal of attention, and appropriately so. Agencies review policy, examine decision-making, update tactics, conduct refresher training, revise reporting requirements, evaluate supervision, and prepare officers for the legal, administrative, and public scrutiny that may follow a critical incident. The reason is obvious. Use-of-force decisions carry enormous consequences for the officer, the agency, the subject, the community, and the courtroom.
But that raises a difficult question.
Why is interview and interrogation training not subjected to the same level of review?
Investigative interviewing is also a high-liability function. It can influence the direction of a case, the reliability of a statement, the treatment of a suspect, the outcome of a prosecution, and the credibility of the agency itself. A poor interview may not create the immediate visual impact of a use-of-force incident, but its damage can be just as severe and, in some cases, far more enduring. A contaminated statement, coerced confession, confirmation-biased interview, or misread behavioral cue may echo through reports, warrants, plea negotiations, suppression hearings, trials, appeals, civil litigation, and public trust.
The Risk We Often Miss
Agencies know how to review obvious risk. Firearms training is updated. Use-of-force policies are revised. Crowd-control practices are reconsidered after major events. Equipment changes. Reporting language changes. Scenario training changes. Legal updates are pushed into roll call, in-service training, and supervision.
Yet interview and interrogation training often receives far less scrutiny. In many agencies, the course survives because it has always been taught, the instructor has always taught it, or the method has become part of the department’s investigative culture. That is not an audit. That is inheritance.
Other high-liability skill sets are often improved because agencies study what actually happened. A crowd-control method may be revised after a public-order event. A weapons-retention technique may be changed after an officer is disarmed or nearly disarmed. A use-of-force tactic may be adjusted after video review, litigation, policy analysis, or after-action reporting. The driving question is simple: how do we do better next time?
Interview and interrogation training should be subjected to the same standard. Concepts should not survive merely because they are familiar. They should be tested against actual application and evaluated against outcomes. Did the method protect the reliability of the statement? Did it reduce contamination risk? Did it improve the quality of the narrative? Did it help investigators avoid confirmation bias? Did it withstand supervisory, prosecutorial, and courtroom review? Without that kind of outcome evaluation, an agency may be repeating a method without ever knowing whether the method improved the interview or damaged it.
The danger is that inherited training can install inherited risk. If a course teaches investigators to rely on unsupported deception cues, contamination-prone questioning, confession-driven tactics, or outdated assumptions about resistance, denial, minimization, or subject behavior, the agency is not merely offering a class. It is shaping future investigative decisions.
Outdated Training Does Not Stay in the Classroom
Some interview and interrogation concepts still appearing in training rooms today trace back decades, in some cases more than 50 years, despite major changes in research, law, recording practices, false-confession awareness, and courtroom scrutiny. Few agencies would equip officers today based only on the firearms, radios, vehicles, crowd-control tactics, or use-of-force practices of the 1970s. Those areas have been reviewed, litigated, updated, and retrained. Why should interview and interrogation training be treated differently?
The classroom is not separate from the case file. What is taught in the classroom appears later in interview rooms, reports, warrant affidavits, prosecutor meetings, suppression hearings, and testimony. If the training teaches investigators to see deception in eye movement, posture, nervous gestures, handwriting, crossed arms, or other behavioral fragments without meaningful scientific support, those assumptions may follow the case long after the class has ended.
A method does not become valid because it has been repeated for decades. It does not become reliable because it appears in a PowerPoint. It does not become defensible because an instructor says, “This has worked for me.” If the concept lacks meaningful social-science validation, the agency should be cautious about placing it in front of investigators as an investigative tool.
Experience Is Not Expertise
Experience is important, but experience is not expertise. This matters when agencies select instructors as much as when they select curriculum. Finding a qualified interview and interrogation instructor is not as simple as finding someone who has conducted interviews, attended a class, or served as an investigator for many years. The instructor must be able to carry the room, teach under pressure, answer difficult questions, connect methods to current research, and demonstrate that the concepts being taught have been evaluated beyond personal opinion or tradition.
A qualified instructor should also have the discipline to say, “I don’t know.” That may be one of the most ethical answers an instructor can give when the question is outside the instructor’s knowledge, research base, or field experience. The better answer is not to manufacture certainty in front of the room. The better answer is, “I don’t know, but now I am on a mission to find that answer for you.” Interview and interrogation training carries too much consequence for an instructor to create an answer that sounds intelligent but may be wrong. A confident unsupported answer can become tomorrow’s classroom doctrine, next month’s interview practice, and next year’s courtroom problem.
With genuine expertise comes curiosity and inquiry. The best instructors are not threatened by questions. They are sharpened by them. In self-defense training, the best black belts often keep what is sometimes called a white-belt mentality. They understand that mastery is not a finish line. It is a continuing process of learning, testing, correcting, and refining. The same should be true in interview and interrogation training. A qualified instructor should not act as though the subject has been conquered. The instructor should be able to explain what is known, identify what is uncertain, remain open to correction, and continue searching for better answers. True learning and mastery have not been completed. They have begun.
Agencies should be cautious about the common assumption that attendance equals instructor qualification. I have had students attend a three-day interview and interrogation program and tell me on the final day that they were sent so they could return to their academy and teach the material to others. That may be well-intended, but it raises an obvious concern. Exposure to a method is not the same as mastery of the method. Completion of a course is not proof that the student is prepared to teach, defend, adapt, or evaluate that method.
Watching multiple episodes of a courtroom television show does not make someone a lawyer. In the same way, attending an interview and interrogation class does not automatically make someone qualified to teach interview and interrogation. Exposure is not mastery. Familiarity is not expertise. The ability to repeat a slide is not the same as the ability to explain, defend, test, and properly apply the method behind it.
Nor should agencies assume that academic credentials alone solve the problem. A researcher may understand the literature but have little or no experience conducting high-stakes interviews, managing resistant subjects, teaching investigators under pressure, or seeing whether a method can be successfully deployed in the field. That does not make the research unimportant. It means research knowledge and operational competence are not the same thing.
The better standard is not academic title or field experience alone. The better standard is demonstrated expertise. Has the instructor done the work? Has the instructor studied the research? Can the instructor explain the limits of the method as clearly as the benefits? Has the method been tested beyond anecdote? Has it been taught, applied, evaluated, corrected, and refined under real investigative conditions? Can the instructor answer difficult questions from experienced investigators, prosecutors, supervisors, and defense-minded reviewers without retreating into folklore, war stories, or credentials?
The Einstellung Problem
Training matters because, under pressure, people tend to fall back on familiar solution patterns. This is one way to understand the Einstellung problem: once a person has been trained to solve a problem in a familiar way, that familiar solution may dominate even when a better response is available. In investigative interviewing, that matters.
If the training is current, reliable, and disciplined, defaulting to the trained response can protect the interviewer and the case. But if the training is outdated, unsupported, or contamination-prone, the investigator may default to the flaw. If investigators have been trained to rely on behavioral cues, minimization themes, implied consequences, or confession-driven questioning, the agency has not simply failed to update a class. It may have installed the failure response.
This is why the training room matters. The investigator under pressure may not rise to the best theory available. The investigator often falls to the level of the training that was practiced, repeated, and reinforced. If that training is flawed, the agency should not be surprised when the flaw reappears in a high-stakes interview.
Check Mark Training or Bench Mark Training?
One of the first questions in an interview training audit is whether the agency is selecting courses to satisfy a check mark or to meet a benchmark. Check mark training asks whether the agency offered an interview and interrogation class. Benchmark training asks whether the course is current, research-aware, legally defensible, operationally useful, and taught by someone qualified to explain and defend the method.
There is a significant difference between filling a training calendar and improving investigative performance. A course may satisfy an annual training requirement and still leave investigators with outdated assumptions, unsupported deception cues, contamination-prone questioning habits, or methods that cannot withstand courtroom scrutiny. That is not professional development. It is liability packaged as training.
The better question for the training director is not, “Can we check the box?” The better question is, “Would we be comfortable explaining this curriculum, this instructor, and this method under oath?”
How Should an Agency Vet the Course and the Instructor?
An interview and interrogation training audit does not have to begin as an adversarial process. It can begin with a simple professional question: if this course is going to influence how investigators question victims, witnesses, complainants, informants, claimants, and suspects, what proof does the agency have that the course is current, reliable, and defensible?
The first area to examine is the curriculum itself. Training directors should ask whether the course teaches deception detection, behavioral analysis, confession development, persuasion, minimization, rapport, confrontation, or theme-based questioning. If it does, the next question is obvious: what evidence supports those claims? A course that teaches investigators to infer deception from eye behavior, posture, gestures, handwriting, nervous movement, or other behavioral fragments should be required to identify the research supporting those claims. If the support is missing, outdated, anecdotal, or based only on instructor experience, the agency should treat that as a warning sign.
The second area is legal and operational risk. Does the course teach investigators how to avoid contaminating a statement? Does it distinguish persuasion from manipulation? Does it address false-confession risk? Does it teach documentation practices that allow supervisors, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and juries to understand how the statement was developed? Does it emphasize corroboration, narration, and reliability, or does it push investigators toward agreement, admission, and confession language before the statement has been tested?
The third area is instructor qualification. Training directors should be cautious about assuming that experience alone equals expertise. The question is not simply whether the instructor has conducted interviews. The question is whether the instructor can explain the method, teach it under scrutiny, identify its limitations, connect it to current research, and defend why it belongs in the classroom.
Agencies should also ask how the instructor became an instructor. Was the instructor formally trained to teach the method, or merely sent to a class and told to bring the material back to the academy? Has the instructor taught the material live to investigators who ask difficult questions? Has the instructor conducted interviews in settings where the consequences were real? Has the instructor studied the research, contributed to the field, evaluated the method, or demonstrated proof of concept beyond personal opinion? Can the instructor explain not only what to do, but why it works, when it fails, and what risks it creates?
Could the Method Survive Courtroom Scrutiny?
A meaningful audit should also ask whether the method could survive courtroom scrutiny. Has the method ever been subjected to a Daubert challenge? Has it passed? If not, could it even come close? Has the method been tested? Is there a known or potential error rate? Has it been subjected to peer review? Is it generally accepted within the relevant scientific or professional community? Are the instructor’s claims supported by research, or are they based on tradition, anecdote, personal confidence, or “this is how we have always done it”?
Not every classroom concept will arrive with a reported appellate decision attached to it. But that does not excuse the agency from asking courtroom-quality questions before the method is taught. If a course teaches investigators to infer deception from eye movement, posture, handwriting, nervous gestures, crossed arms, or other behavioral fragments, the agency should ask what would happen if that claim were challenged in court. Could the instructor explain the scientific basis? Could the agency defend why it placed that concept in front of investigators? Could the method survive cross-examination?
That is the point of the audit. The question is not merely whether the instructor sounds confident in the classroom. The question is whether the method can withstand scrutiny outside the classroom.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
The financial consequences of investigative failure can be substantial. Use-of-force failures often create immediate and visible liability. Failed interview and interrogation practices may create delayed, compounding liability through wrongful convictions, civil rights litigation, retrials, dismissed cases, years of incarceration, damaged victims, and loss of public confidence.
Recent wrongful conviction litigation illustrates the point. In March 2025, a federal jury awarded John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell $120 million in damages in a wrongful conviction lawsuit involving the Chicago Police Department. Each man was awarded $60 million after spending 16 years in prison before their convictions were overturned. The case is a powerful reminder that the costs of investigative failure may arrive years later, but when they arrive, they can be enormous.
The cost is not only financial. A bad interview can misdirect an investigation, damage a victim’s case, pressure an innocent person, protect the actual offender, compromise prosecution, and weaken trust in the agency. The courtroom may expose the problem, but the problem often began much earlier, in the training room.
If It Cannot Survive Court, It Should Not Survive Class
Interview and interrogation training should be audited because it is too important to inherit, assume, or ignore. Agencies would not tolerate outdated firearms doctrine, unsupported use-of-force instruction, or crowd-control tactics that no longer match law, policy, or operational reality. They should not tolerate outdated interview and interrogation methods either.
A proper audit does not attack training. It protects it. It asks whether the course is current, whether the instructor is qualified, whether the methods are supported, whether the risks are addressed, and whether the agency would be comfortable defending the curriculum in court.
In some cases, the most effective audit may require both an interview and interrogation subject-matter expert and legal counsel. The subject-matter expert can identify unsupported methods, contamination risks, reliability problems, and operational weaknesses. Legal counsel can evaluate how those same issues may appear under Daubert-style scrutiny, suppression litigation, civil discovery, policy review, or courtroom cross-examination.
The point is not to make training harder to obtain. The point is to make training worth obtaining.
If a method cannot survive courtroom scrutiny, why is it surviving in the classroom?
© 2026 by Stan B. Walters All Rights Reserved
Consider an Interview and Interrogation Training Audit
If your agency has not recently reviewed its interview and interrogation curriculum, instructor qualifications, deception-detection content, false-confession safeguards, and courtroom vulnerability, now may be the time to do so. A proper audit can help determine whether the training being delivered is research-aware, operationally reliable, legally defensible, and consistent with modern investigative standards.
LLRMI works with agencies on high-liability training, legal review, policy concerns, and risk management. For information about conducting an audit of your interview and interrogation training, contact LLRMI.
Author’s Note
Stan Walters holds a second-degree black belt in Krav Maga. He often sees the same lesson in self-defense training that he sees in interview and interrogation: real mastery is not about adding more moves. It is about finding sharper ideas, cleaner execution, and fewer wasted motions. Techniques improve when they are tested, applied, evaluated, corrected, and refined. The goal is not to protect old methods simply because they are familiar. The goal is to keep asking, “How do we do better the next time?”
Author Research & Publication Profiles
One practical step in auditing an interview and interrogation course is to examine the instructor’s professional and research footprint. Training directors should look for more than a course biography. Public research profiles, peer-reviewed publications, professional papers, and documented field experience help distinguish demonstrated expertise from inherited curriculum or unsupported training claims.
Stan B. Walters’ research and publication profiles include ORCID, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and SSRN.
