Reid Training Programs
The Reid P.E.A.C.E. Method of Investigative Interviewing and Interrogation
Note: This training program has been specifically designed for investigators in the state of Hawaii to highlight guidelines prescribed by Hawaii’s Supreme Court in State v. Mustafa Baker (decided 18 June 2020).
The Reid P.E.A.C.E Method of Investigative Interviewing and Interrogation merges core Reid tenets of rapport-centric evidence-based questioning with protocols established by the United Kingdom’s “College of Policing” on Authorized Professional Practices for law enforcement.
For over seven decades, John E. Reid & Associates, Inc., has advanced the art of investigative interviewing and interrogation through reliance upon a non-coercive approach combined with persuasive argumentation to establish facts, assess interviewee credibility, and obtain admissions against interest that are both voluntary as well as reliable. The Reid P.E.A.C.E. Method narrows the interviewing scope to evidence-based inquires as the principal means of eliciting truthful disclosures from suspects, witnesses, and victims of unlawful behavior.
This program’s focus upon evidence-based questioning is a natural outgrowth of the origins of the Reid Technique. Its developers, John E. Reid and Fred E. Inbau, were both attorneys who were well trained in courtroom skills. Those tools have always been embedded within the Reid Technique along with a firm commitment to constitutional safeguards that respect the legal rights and human dignity of the accused.
The Reid P.E.A.C.E Method places emphasis upon techniques which are commonplace within judicial proceedings such as direct/cross examination and credibility challenges through prior inconsistent statements, forensic inconsistencies, factual deficiencies within a subject's own narrative, subject demeanor, prior behavior, character, reputation, and personal background that may reveal propensity and motive. Interrogations which are predicated upon these criteria are grounded exclusively, and bluntly, in fact.
Essential elements of the Reid "Behavior Analysis Interview" and "Nine Steps of Interrogation" are preserved within this training program which not only conforms to existing constitutional protections inherent among standardized Reid Best Practices but also avoids psychological minimization while expressly prohibiting false-friend overtures, gender-based stereotypes, explicit or implicit promises of judicial leniency as quid-pro-quo for a confession, references that repeated denials are tantamount to proof of guilt, and deception concerning incontrovertible physical evidence.