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

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

Abstract

Interrogating the Images: Audio-Visually Recorded Police Questioning of Suspects. By David Dixon, with Gail Travis (Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2007, 292pp, £22.99 pb) 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 The ensuing evaluation report remains unpublished and seemingly forgotten.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