Inside Interrogation Room

Verifying authenticity of information being provided by suspects and criminals during investigation is always been a challenge for Police and Law & Enforcement professionals across the world. While statement analysis remains confined to scrutiny of facts and figures only, nonverbal analysis provides us large spectrum of information about suspects, criminals or witnesses being questioned in real time.

Different nonverbal clues given away by person being questioned can convey affective (emotional), cognitive, associative, physical and social statuses with varying degrees. Hence nonverbal analysis has critical importance during investigation procedure apart of verbal information being provided by persons under scrutiny. For same, interrogation rooms have been designed by Law & Enforcement in almost every country.

Interrogation rooms are designed to discourage suspects and criminals and bring them to confess crime they (might have) committed. The kind of physical environment posed on unconscious mind of person being interrogated is that normally anybody could hardly manage to stay in for long time by own will. Complete isolation from rest of the world is the key element to make person under scrutiny to feel completely helpless.

Interrogation Chair ("Hot Seat")

Person being interrogated is often discouraged to act upon its own will and defend itself physically. To add into intensity of terror, person is put beneath a small light source so that rest of physical surrounding remains under darkness. Coupled with same, enlarged lurking eyes of interrogators from darkness induces enormous terror inside human mind just like what a prey would feel during few moments before getting hunted by fierce and merciless predator in dark and thick forest.

Suspects and criminals are generally compelled to seat on a small chair with no arm rests and let to move on very limited physical area. However, interrogators can freely move back, forth and around them on will. In fact, they intrude personal comfort zone (intimate and personal zones in Proxemics) and try to break down psychological defense and normal tactics of a person under scrutiny.

Under immense fear, criminals and suspects easily leak out unconscious distress body signs that expert eyes can easily catch and drill deeper into mind of persons being interrogated for direct or indirect connection with crime. True purpose of any interrogation procedure is not just to authenticate information being provided by suspects and criminals but also to understand clues given by them and try to co-relate them with facts and figures being shared.

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