Abstract

A confession in a criminal investigation is a prosecution’s most potent weapon and is sometimes the best available evidence. Identifying the profile of an effective interrogator may improve interview performance and personnel selection. Data concerning personality, interviewing competency, and communicative suspicion was collected from 29 police interrogators employed with large police forces across Canada. Interrogators reported on the outcome of their interrogations of suspects over a six-month period. It was expected that interrogators who obtain a positive outcome (full confession, partial admission, cleared innocent) would likely score high on four of the five factors of the NEO-PI, but low on N; would tend to score high on all dimensions of the competency scale (C-T, CNR, DI and Co), except for the Be scale; and would score moderately on the communicative suspiciousness measure. Results indicated a significant but inverse relationship between interrogation outcome and two pairs of variables: Conscientiousness and Careful-Tenacious, and Extroversion and Careful-Tenacious, each accounting for nearly 25% of the variance. A suppression effect is present. The knowledge gained from this experiment will assist police forces in Canada with the identification and selection process of two main groups of police officers, investigators who are called upon to interrogate persons suspected of having committed serious criminal activities and polygraph operators.