Overview

The way in which eyewitness testimony is reported and then recorded by a police officer during a criminal investigation, has seen proneness to distortion, contradiction and even omission. For a long time eyewitness testimony has relied on handwritten statements taken by a police officer. This study illustrates which aspects of the eyewitnesses account are changed during the statement taking process, and how. Such practices have received very little criticism from the judiciary, despite there being a plethora of psychological research on the subject, there has been very little change to the way eyewitness testimony is recorded. When a police officer takes a statement from an eyewitness, information can be distorted, subject to contradiction or even lost, this information could be crucial evidentially in a criminal trial. This study has analysed ten real-life police witness statements, handwritten by police officers during interview, and concurrently audio recorded by the researcher, in order to investigate errors which occur. This enables us to understand how the statement can change from being the eyewitnesses account to the police officers account, and how statements are subject to errors and omissions of information.

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9781499547559

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