• Lorana Bartels
• Australian Institute of Criminology

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15 July 2011In this paper, some of the key issues police are likely to encounter when dealing with vulnerable adult suspects are considered and an overview of the Australian legislation and police policies governing police interviews in such circumstances is presented. This paper is concerned with vulnerable adults interviewed by the police as suspects. It is acknowledged, however, that many of the observations about good practice when interviewing witnesses continue to apply—perhaps to an even greater extent—when interviewing suspects. For example, interviewers’ questions need to be matched to respondents’ communicative abilities and suggestive/leading questions and other coercive practices should be avoided (Powell 2002). Smith and Tilney (2007), and Bull (2010) have described the following steps as a means of achieving the best evidence when dealing with vulnerable witnesses:

• establish good rapport, including establishing the ground rules and advising the interviewee that it is acceptable to say if they do not understand or know the answer;
• obtain as much free narrative as possible, encouraging the interviewee with prompts and open-ended questions such as ‘tell me more about that’ and ‘what happened next?’;
• ask questions of the right type in the right order. For example, open questions should precede specific questions and then closed questions. Leading questions should only be used as a last resort;
• have meaningful closure, including a summary of the interviewee’s evidence and providing them with an opportunity to correct any errors; and
• evaluate the interview, in terms of both the information obtained and the interviewer’s performance.

This paper does not consider issues relating to court processes and the admissibility of evidence; nor does the paper explore the literature in relation to child witnesses (eg see Powell, Wright & Clark 2010) or the specific issues of vulnerable witnesses as victims, for example, in the context of sexual assault matters (eg see Powell & Wright 2009), although these are all important linked areas of research.