Dixon, D. (2007). * INTERROGATING IMAGES

Abstract

Interrogating Images is an empirical study of the routine use of audio-visual recording of suspect interviews by the New South Wales (NSW) Police, Australia. The development, implementation, and operational review of the Electronically Recorded Interview of a Suspected Person (ERISP) outlined in this study is then used as a parable for more general developments in police interviewing techniques and regulation. There is some limited comparison to other common-law jurisdictions, e.g. UK, USA, and Canada.1 The book is held together by the thread of Dixon's argument that ERISP will not heal the wrongs from an earlier era. The book is set against a backdrop of the corrupt and pernicious tactic of ‘verballing’ of ‘crooks’ [sic] by the Australian police. This tactic entailed the creation of a plausible confession by investigating officers that was then attributed to the suspect, a practice validated by an apparently unconcerned judiciary. Confession became the leitmotif of a police-dominated prosecutorial system, which reached its peak in the 1970s. The growing number of in-trial challenges to these ‘confessions’, and a burgeoning lobby from interested parties, led the NSW Criminal Law Review Division to conclude with ‘a high degree of certainty that deliberately false evidence relating to confessional statements has been given by the police’ (p. 13).