Does Video Recording Alter the Behavior of Police During Interrogation? A Mock Crime-and-Investigation Study

A field study conducted in a midsized city police department examined whether video recording alters the process of interrogation. Sixty-one investigators inspected a staged crime scene and interrogated a male mock suspect in sessions that were surreptitiously recorded. By random assignment, half the suspects had committed the mock crime; the other half were innocent. Half the police participants were informed that the sessions were being recorded; half were not. Coding of the interrogations revealed the use of several common tactics designed to get suspects to confess. Importantly, police in the camera-informed condition were less likely than those in the -uninformed condition to use minimization tactics and marginally less likely to use maximization tactics. They were also perceived by suspects-who were all uninformed of the camera manipulation-as trying less hard to elicit a confession. Unanticipated results indicated that camera-informed police were better able to discriminate between guilty and innocent suspects in their judgments and behavior. The results as a whole indicate that video recording can affect the process of interrogation-notably, by inhibiting the use of certain tactics. It remains to be seen whether these findings generalize to longer and more consequential sessions and whether the camera-induced differences found are to be judged as favorable or unfavorable.