Miscarriages of justice

Give and Take: The Bifurcation of Police Reform in Britain

“…It is highly relevant that the immediate spur for the formation of the IPCC was the Macpherson Report into the failings of the police in relation to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson, 1999;Savage & Milne, 2007). The Report recommended the establishment of an independent body for the investigation of serious complaints against the police explicitly as a means of improving public confidence in the police (Macpherson, 1999: Recommendation 58), particularly among minority ethnic communities.…”

Developing a linguistically informed approach to police interviewing

“…In England and Wales it has been claimed that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984, and the associated implementation of the PEACE 1 interviewing model, led to a significant decrease in the number of miscarriages of justice occurring as a result of poorly conducted suspect interviews. However, it is further claimed that PACE had little impact on the interviewing of victims and witnesses, which remained flawed on the grounds that many officers assumed that the interviewing of a co-operative and competent adult witness required little specialist skill (Savage and Milne 2007). The interviewing of suspects is now guided by the Conversation Management model (Shepherd and Griffiths 2013), while the interviewing of significant witnesses is guided by the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI) model (Milne and Bull 1999;Milne 2004).…”

Probation, PSRs and public protection: Has a ‘critical point’ been reached?

“…As noted earlier, there is a veritable industry concerned with police interviewing methods which dates back many years. Arising from concern over miscarriages of justice (Savage and Milne, 2007) there are now measures not only to protect the rights of suspects during police investigation, but training programmes to ensure that the very best quality information is produced from that process. A major aspect of this protection comes in the form of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984.…”

“…The second part concerns the changing nature of the probation service role in general, and that of the probation officer in particular, and its impact on how interviews with offenders are, and perhaps should be, conducted. This will be considered in the light of research on police interview techniques with high risk offenders (Holmberg and Christianson, 2002) and the potential of those techniques to lead to miscarriages of justice (Savage and Milne, 2007). The third part concerns the type of training that probation officers and police officers receive in interviewing techniques and what may be learned from either organization.…”