Interrogating the Images: Audio-Visually Recorded Police Questioning of Suspects

As this book suggests, criminological research can occasionally be parochial. In particular, the pre-eminence of European and North American work in the English-speaking world is well established. While we might be familiar with some of the worst excesses of Australian policing in terms of how Aboriginal peoples are dealt with, we know little of some of the effort that is being made routinely to up-date Australian police practices in other areas. This timely book seeks to redress that imbalance. In particular, it focuses on the use of audio-visual recording of interviews by the New South Wales police. It raises interesting questions, at least for this reviewer, about why the practice is not more common in other jurisdictions, particularly as relatively extensive pilot projects were undertaken in England and Wales by the Home Office. The ensuing evaluation report remains unpublished and seemingly forgotten. The New South Wales police force began Electronically Recorded Interviews with Suspected Persons (ERISP) in 1991. This was in response to the widespread practice of ‘verballing’—the fabrication of confessions—and subsequent miscarriages of justice revealed by the increasing use of DNA analysis. Verballing had become such an entrenched part of policing practice, tacitly accepted by judges who allowed uncorroborated records of interviews to be admitted as evidence, that it took some time for worries about infringed civil liberties to emerge. Unlike, for example, in England and Wales, where the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) provides a legislative framework for police powers, each state has its own police force and there are no federal standardized rules governing the conduct of interviews. Indeed, in New South Wales, prior to 1997, there were no legal frameworks for the detention and questioning of suspects between arrest and charge. Although legislation was eventually introduced which allowed for electronic recording of police interviews in the state, it is still not a mandatory requirement that each suspect should be interviewed in this way, although most now are. Confessions made in unrecorded interviews must subsequently be recorded and ‘adopted’ in order for them to be admissible in court. When visual recording of interviews finally began, there was a widespread belief that they would be a panacea, yet that position was generally adopted without empirical evidence. Dixon shows that this was sometimes an unwise assumption. While the tapes appear largely to have resolved the issue of verballing, they themselves raise other questions.

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