Police negotiators and criminal interviewers often use similar words—rapport, empathy, listening, influence and information gathering. That surface similarity can tempt two opposite errors. One is to treat the disciplines as unrelated and allow training, research and quality assurance to develop in isolation. The other is to assume that a technique effective in one setting can simply be imported into another.
Neither position is defensible. Hostage and crisis negotiation research describes active listening, relationship building, empathy and influence as central constructs, but also acknowledges that a strong, ecologically valid evidence base remains underdeveloped.3 Investigative interviewing has a larger body of field, laboratory and review evidence on rapport-based, information-gathering practice, although that evidence also contains observational designs, simulations and uneven training effects.5789
The practical proposition is therefore modest: keep the operational disciplines distinct, but create a shared communication-science programme that measures behaviour, tests transfer and protects legal, ethical and operational boundaries.
Evidence
There is a credible overlap—but the evidence is uneven
MOREPIES gives negotiators a memorable set of active-listening behaviours: minimal encouragers, open questions, reflecting or mirroring, emotion labelling, paraphrasing, “I” messages, effective pauses and summaries. It appears in College of Policing guidance, while the FBI has published a closely aligned eight-skill framework and a structured exercise for observing and feeding back performance.12 These sources establish professional use and a plausible training mechanism; they do not, by themselves, establish which element causes safer resolution, for whom, or under what conditions.
That distinction is important. Grubb’s synthesis concludes that policing has not yet validated an empirically derived model capable of predicting effective negotiation strategy.3 One doctoral study coded the first 20 minutes of only 12 simulated negotiations and found no statistically significant Pearson correlations between active-listening proportions and later response style, although visual patterns suggested hypotheses worth testing.4 This is not evidence that active listening fails. It is evidence that confidence in specific causal claims should remain calibrated.
Evidence judgement
MOREPIES is a useful practice framework, not a proven causal package
It is reasonable to teach and rehearse the component behaviours. It is not yet reasonable to say that every component, frequency or sequence has been shown to improve operational outcomes across crisis, hostage, kidnap and extortion incidents.
Investigative interviewing offers stronger evidence that interpersonal behaviour can be observed and related to outcomes. In the original ORBIT field study, 58 interviewers were observed across 418 video-recorded terrorism interviews—288 hours of footage. Motivational-interviewing-consistent and adaptive interpersonal behaviour were associated with greater useful-information yield, while even low levels of maladaptive behaviour were associated with poorer suspect behaviour and reduced yield.5 A related analysis of 181 police interviews with 49 convicted terrorism suspects found that adaptive and motivational-interviewing-consistent behaviours were associated with reductions in several forms of counter-interrogation behaviour, but the pattern was not uniformly beneficial across every outcome.6 These are valuable operational data, but they are observational associations rather than randomised proof.
Training evidence is encouraging but similarly qualified. A two-day rapport-based course involving 67 experienced investigators and 125 community interviewees changed investigators’ use of evidence-informed tactics; reported pathways linked those behaviours to perceived rapport and trust, reduced resistance and increased information yield.7 Yet a systematic review of 30 interview-training studies found mixed effects. Basic skills could improve after short courses, whereas demanding skills such as question selection and meaningful rapport-building were harder to sustain; repeated sessions produced the most consistent change.8
At the wider method level, the 2024 Campbell review of 29 independent experimental studies found that information-gathering approaches produced more true confessions on average than accusatorial or direct-questioning approaches, while accusatorial approaches produced more false confessions.9 The implication for UK practice is not that confession is the objective—it should not be—but that non-coercive, information-gathering approaches have both effectiveness and reliability advantages.
| Claim | Evidence position | Practical reading |
|---|---|---|
| Active listening is embedded in negotiator practice | Supported by UK guidance and published FBI training material.12 | |
| MOREPIES as a complete package causes safer resolutions | Do not infer causation from professional acceptance or face validity.34 | |
| Adaptive, rapport-based interviewing is associated with cooperation and yield | Promising operational associations, with important design limitations.567 | |
| Information-gathering outperforms accusatorial interviewing | Systematic-review findings favour accuracy and reduce false-confession risk.9 | |
| One-off training creates durable advanced skill | Use spaced practice, coaching and follow-up assessment.8 |
Understanding
One communication family, three different operational jobs
UK negotiator deployments range from people in suicidal crisis to criminal, domestic, barricade, hostage, kidnap and extortion contexts. Research based on English negotiators identified a broad set of deployment categories, while analysis of 166 deployments across Norfolk and Suffolk demonstrated the value—and the limits—of standardised operational data.1112 The label “negotiation” therefore conceals material differences in subject, leverage, time, risk and command.
| Dimension | Person in crisis / hostage incident | Kidnap and extortion | Criminal suspect interview |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary aim | Preserve life, reduce immediate harm and move towards safe resolution | Protect life, manage demands and support a complex criminal investigation | Obtain an accurate, reliable and testable account within due process |
| Interaction | Live, unstable and often prolonged | Adversarial, strategic, potentially cross-border and protracted | Planned, recorded and procedurally bounded |
| Legal frame | Command decisions, necessity, proportionality, safeguarding and operational policy | Criminal law, covert authorities where applicable, disclosure, intelligence and specialist policy | PACE and Codes, caution, legal advice, recording, vulnerability and evidential fairness |
| Information objective | Understand emotion, intent, capability, needs and movement | Assess credibility, proof of life, networks, demands and risk without compromising tactics | Develop, challenge and verify an account against evidence and reasonable lines of enquiry |
| Public transfer limit | Do not convert listening aids into a rigid script | Protect covert and sensitive methodology; transfer only openly publishable principles | Never allow “influence” language to erode rights, voluntariness or fairness |
The legal boundary is particularly sharp in suspect interviewing. PACE Code C requires a caution before questions where answers or silence may be given in evidence; defines an interview as questioning about involvement or suspected involvement in an offence; governs significant statements; and contains specific safeguards for juveniles and vulnerable people, including the role of an appropriate adult.1014 A crisis conversation is not a procedural shortcut around those requirements. If interaction becomes questioning that falls within the Code, the legal framework follows the function, not the job title of the officer speaking.
Kidnap and extortion should also remain a distinct specialism. Some of its tactics, intelligence arrangements and decision thresholds cannot responsibly be published or transferred openly. The shared agenda proposed here concerns overt human-communication behaviours and the science of training and evaluation—not disclosure of covert methods.
Cross-fertilisation should occur at the level of observable communication behaviour, training design and evaluation—not through the uncritical transfer of operational doctrine.
What negotiators can contribute to interviewing
Negotiator training offers repeated exposure to emotional intensity, uncertainty, interruption, fatigue, team coaching and rapidly changing risk. Those conditions make it a useful setting for deliberate practice in remaining calm, listening for both content and emotion, resisting premature problem-solving, tolerating silence and receiving live feedback. The FBI’s active-listening target shows how discrete behaviours can be observed and discussed during scenario work.2
Interviewers could benefit from more practice in those pressure conditions—especially when an interviewee is distressed, hostile, fearful, withdrawn or apparently resistant. The benefit would not be “negotiating” with a suspect. It would be strengthening self-regulation and adaptive listening while preserving the interview plan, evidential purpose and safeguards.
What interviewing research can contribute to negotiation
Investigative interviewing can contribute measurement discipline: coding observable behaviours, defining information yield, assessing inter-rater reliability, tracking resistance and testing whether training changes practice. ORBIT demonstrates that broad concepts such as rapport can be translated into observable adaptive and maladaptive interaction, rather than assessed only through intuition or incident outcome.56 Interview-training research also cautions that complex skill is unlikely to be secured by a single course without reinforcement.8
Negotiation could use the same research discipline without pretending that the interview-room outcome measure is appropriate to a live crisis. A safe surrender, continued dialogue, reduced immediacy, verifiable information and absence of injury are different outcomes, with different confounders. The relevant lesson is to specify them before evaluating technique.
Options
A bounded programme for shared learning
The evidence supports careful experimentation, not wholesale integration. The most defensible organisational options are those that preserve specialist governance while creating common methods for practice and evaluation.
Create a shared communication skills laboratory
Use short, recorded scenarios to practise open questions, reflections, summaries, emotion labels, pauses, autonomy support and adaptive challenge. Scenarios should be separately designed and assessed for crisis, kidnap/extortion and interviewing contexts.
Build one observational language, with context-specific standards
Develop a common behavioural dictionary for overt communication, then specify when, why and how each behaviour should be used in each discipline. Frequency counts alone are inadequate: timing, accuracy, tone and response to the other person all need coding.
Use spaced coaching, not course completion, as the unit of competence
Assess before training, immediately afterwards and in operational or realistic follow-up. The review evidence favours repeated sessions for complex skills and warns against assuming retention from a short intervention.8
Link deployment and interview data without flattening outcomes
Maintain separate outcome sets, but use compatible descriptors for behaviour, subject presentation, context, supervision and training exposure. The National Negotiator Deployment Database demonstrates the value of standardisation while its early two-force analysis shows why representativeness must be reported.12
Govern transfer through law, ethics and security review
Any shared module should be signed off by negotiation, interviewing, legal, ethics, safeguarding and information-security leads. The Méndez Principles provide a useful international benchmark: effective interviewing should be grounded in science, law, ethics and safeguards.13
Do not transfer
Covert kidnap and extortion tactics into public curricula.
Negotiation influence models into suspect interviews without PACE, ethics and disclosure review.
Interview “yield” measures as a proxy for safety or success in live negotiation.
Simple technique counts as proof of communication quality.
Next steps
Start with a testable pilot, not a national doctrine
A practical first phase could involve two or three forces, an academic partner and nationally recognised leads from negotiation and investigative interviewing. It should exclude covert kidnap and extortion content from shared materials while still allowing appropriately cleared specialists to advise governance.
- Define. Agree a small set of overt behaviours, legal boundaries, context-specific outcomes and prohibited transfer areas.
- Baseline. Code existing training scenarios and a lawful sample of operational material, with independent double-coding and inter-rater checks.
- Train. Deliver spaced cross-disciplinary practice in mixed faculty teams, while learners remain assessed against their own discipline’s standards.
- Test. Compare pre-training, post-training and follow-up behaviour; examine information quality, cooperation, safety indicators, fairness and unintended effects.
- Decide. Publish methods and aggregate findings, identify where transfer worked or failed, and only then consider wider adoption.
The core research question should not be “does rapport work?” It should be more exact: which observable behaviour, used by whom, at what stage, with which subject presentation, produces what immediate and downstream effect? That formulation is demanding, but it is how a craft becomes a cumulative evidence-based discipline.
Sources
References and evidence notes
Sources were selected for direct relevance, methodological value and authority. Operational guidance is distinguished from empirical research. No sensitive or covert negotiator technique is described.
- College of Policing (2020). Conflict management skills: example model — MOREPIES.Authorised professional guidance describing MOREPIES as a crisis-negotiator active-listening model.
- Deitrick, M. and Dalfonzo, V. (2015). An evaluation tool for crisis negotiators.FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin; describes eight active-listening responses and a structured feedback tool.
- Grubb, A. R. (2023). Effective police negotiation: synthesising the strategies and techniques that promote success.Peer-reviewed book chapter; identifies the absence of a validated, empirically derived model of effective police negotiation.
- Guszkowski, K. (2017). Effect of negotiator active listening skills on crisis (hostage) negotiations.Doctoral dissertation; coded 12 simulated negotiations and found no significant Pearson correlations.
- Alison, L. et al. (2013). Why tough tactics fail and rapport gets results: ORBIT.Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 19(4), 411–431; field observation of 418 terrorism interviews.
- Alison, L. et al. (2014). The efficacy of rapport-based techniques for minimising counter-interrogation tactics.Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 20(4), 421–430; 181 police interviews with 49 convicted terrorism suspects.
- Brimbal, L. et al. (2021). Evaluating the benefits of a rapport-based approach to investigative interviews.Law and Human Behavior, 45(1), 55–67; quasi-experimental training study with 67 investigators and 125 interviewees.
- Akca, D., Dion Larivière, C. and Eastwood, J. (2021). Assessing the efficacy of investigative interviewing training courses: a systematic review.International Journal of Police Science & Management, 23(1); systematic review of 30 studies.
- Catlin, M. et al. (2024). Interview and interrogation methods and their effects on true and false confessions.Campbell systematic review update; 29 independent experimental studies.
- Home Office (2023). Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 — Code C.Current Code for detention, treatment and questioning of suspects in England and Wales.
- Grubb, A. R. et al. (2019). From ‘sad people on bridges’ to ‘kidnap and extortion’.Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 12(1), 41–65; UK deployment categories based on interviews with negotiators.
- Grubb, A. R. (2020). Understanding the prevalence and situational characteristics of hostage and crisis negotiation in England.Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 35, 98–111; analysis of 166 deployments recorded over 24 months in two forces.
- Méndez Principles Steering Committee (2021). Principles on effective interviewing for investigations and information gathering.International, non-binding guidance grounded in science, law, ethics and procedural safeguards.
- UK Parliament (1984). Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.Primary legislation for police powers and safeguards in England and Wales.