Interview Techniques Level 2

Students will explore more complex interviewing challenges, again using real life case study examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods discussed.

The interactive course will challenge students to understand and adapt to interviewees with challenging personalities, including some personality disorders, substance abuse issues and other factors commonly encountered in criminal behaviour.

Students will also discuss trauma informed interview approaches that can significantly improve interviews with victims and vulnerable witnesses.

Jim Smyth, M.O.M. Chief Instructor

Jim is a seasoned forensic interviewer with 35 years of law enforcement experience. He has successfully obtained court admissible confessions in several of Canada’s most high-profile criminal cases. He has also had a lot of success helping to clear innocent people that were suspected of serious crimes through effective communication. Jim has been very fortunate to have worked with hundreds of high performing teams. Most of Jim’s career has been focused on the investigation of violent crime and supporting those investigations through behavioural analysis of serial crimes, sexual crimes, and homicides. His interest in the skill of forensic interviewing began in the earlier portion of his career, when I was investigating child abuse and sexual assault cases. The allegations were often provided by a young child who was only able to tell us the story from their memory of events, which due to their age, was sometimes confusing. With little to no forensics — or anything else — our options were simply to charge or clear somebody with little evidence or put our best foot forward and try to communicate with the suspect to get a sense of what had occurred. Those interviews helped me to learn how to talk with people in a way that allowed me to get information that is truthful and credible — and showed me that interviewing truly is a skill that must be learned, one that requires a firm grasp on human behaviour, building trust and rapport, and keeping a respectful and level head at all times. My approach to interviewing has also been studied extensively and has been the subject of scientific research projects by some of the world’s leading forensic psychologists, who consistently find that this approach is the most effective and fair way to elicit truthful information from almost anyone.