WHAT IF THE EYEWITNESSES HARDLY TO TELL THE DETAILED OF CRIME EVENT?

                The interrogator should do such a different way to interview the eyewitness than the suspect. The important thing is they should develop a rapport with the eyewitnesses first. Besides, some of the eyewitnesses are the victim too, so the interrogator should build a relaxing interview and not give so much pressure on them. The eyewitnesses who are not the victim sometimes felt pressured too because they are afraid that they would be blackmailed by the suspect or the acquaintance of the suspect. So, the interrogator has to say that the police would priorities their safety and protect their identity (Eyewitnesses confidentiality applied in certain cases).

                Then, the interrogator has to build a safe environment and a relaxing atmosphere. It could reduce the eyewitnesses’ anxiety. The interrogator could start by the open question, such as what happened, without included the suggestive questioning. Next step, the interrogator encourage the eyewitnesses to picture their experience of crime event, clearly in their head. Then, they explain to the interrogator the detail of their experience, for example, their feeling when the crime happened, the sound or the atmosphere of the crime, the detailed crime scene, etc.

               After that, the interrogator could probe the eyewitnesses’ story. Several eyewitnesses give the non-chronological detailed event, so the interrogator helped the eyewitnesses to arrange the event from beginning to end. After the interrogator collected the detailed of the crime event, they would check the background of their eyewitnesses. The interrogators sometimes do that step in the first process of interrogation if the eyewitnesses correlate with the suspect (family, friend, college or work friend, etc.). At the last, the interrogator would read the conclusion of all of the information that they got from the interrogation process.

               The interrogation process not always did well. In reality, not all of the police or interrogators did all of those steps, especially the building rapport step. They sometimes coerced the eyewitnesses to tell their story, but they do not care about the eyewitness well-being. If the event is too traumatic for the eyewitnesses and they did not treated well by the interrogator in the interview process, they would likely show their defense mechanism. The one examples of defense mechanism is when the eyewitnesses block every question so they do not answer. They also could give the untrue answer or untrue detail of crime event because their memory becomes blank or blocked for unknown reasons.              

                If you want to know the example of eyewitnesses or victim’s interview process, you could watch the “Unbelievable”, the American TV Show which tell about catching the serial sexual abuser. Some parts of serial are told about a young girl named Marie Adler who has been raped by someone. [SPOILER] The detectives collected the clues from Marie but she hadn’t treated properly when the interview process was going on. The detective didn’t built rapport on the first time interview and sometimes gave pressure to Marie. In the last interview, the detectives were angry to the victim because she told the same part of event with different detail to the different people or on different time. It made the detectives confused and they acclaimed that the Marie actually just make up the story because of the inconsistency of her story. Marie becomes pressured, so she lied to the detectives that she actually told them the fake story in whole time.