The evolution of police interrogations on screen – The Economist

POLICE INTERROGATIONS are by their very nature dramatic. The stakes are high. There is an imbalance of power. Those involved are under pressure. Narrative is essential to the proceedings: both the police and the suspect have their own version of events, and seek to convince the other that theirs is correct. Interrogations are also an exercise in characterdetectives might play good cop, bad cop in an attempt to winkle out a confession. Important clues can be found in what a suspect says, and what they omit.

Little surprise, then, that interrogations have long featured in police procedurals and buddy-cop shows. Television dramas often saw interrogations as a set piece from which the police would emerge as brave, smart and victorious. In Prime Suspect (1991), the wily and quick-witted DCI Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) would come alive in front of the one-way glass; DCI John Luther (Idris Elba, pictured below) knew how to push a perpetrators buttons. The audience was encouraged to trust the judgment of law enforcement.

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But in recent years, as police brutality and misconduct have made headlines, confessionsand the means by which they are elicitedhave been examined more closely on television. Making a Murderer (2015), a true-crime documentary, shows Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old with learning difficulties, confessing to the murder of Teresa Halbach, a photographer, in 2005. Using footage from the interrogation room, the film-makers argue that the police in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, unconstitutionally coerced him in order to bolster their version of events, which until then had little substantial evidence. The Confession Tapes (2017) likewise takes contentious real-life confessions and inspects them with a rigour that (according to the show) the justice system has failed to.

When They See Us (2019), a four-part series directed by Ava DuVernay, looks at how interrogations, institutional racism and injustice interact. It dramatises the true story of the Central Park Five, a group of minority-ethnic boys wrongly convicted in 1990 of rape and assault. During questioning, the accusedall aged between 14 and 16 at the timewere denied food and drink and access to legal counsel. In the show, they are portrayed as sleep-deprived and desperate, subjected to intense off-the-record questioning in cleaning closets and filing rooms. The police threaten the boys with violence if they do not cooperate; detectives are depicted as more interested in finding someone they can pin the crime on than in nailing the actual perpetrator. In that they were successful: their bullying resulted in taped false confessions, and time in prison for the five boys. (In 2002 a court vacated the convictions.)

In A Confession, a new British drama also based on true events, the failure of Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher (Martin Freeman) to act above board has severe repercussions for the prosecution of a case. In his eagerness to interrogate a taxi driver suspected of murdering a young woman, he ignores the procedures in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The man does confess both to the murder in question and to another, but his statement is inadmissible as evidence in court. Here, once again, law enforcement is shown to be prone to making rash, emotional decisions.

Criminal (pictured top), released on Netflix on September 20th, pursues that idea and sets up a fictional game of cat-and-mouse between detectives and suspects. The drama in each of the 12 episodesset in either Britain, France, Germany or Spainis confined to an interrogation room in an anonymous police station. On one side of the mirror, bright lights illuminate police officers, the accused and, sometimes, a lawyer; on the other, a red-lit backroom hosts office politics, a running commentary on the cases progress and a ticking digital clock which informs the officers how long they have left until they have to charge the suspects or release them. Lies are exposed, but often not the ones the detectives had intended to uncover. Investigators are manipulated, led down wrong paths and frustrated in their quest. The suspects guiltor innocenceis not always clear.

Where interrogations once allowed TVs protagonists a chance to outsmart their opponents and heroically solve cases, now they show them to be fallible: think of the interview in Bodyguard in which David Budds reading of the situation is dangerously wrong. These characters bring their own foibles to bear on cases, and are willing to do whatever is necessary, morally permissible or not, to reinforce their version of events. They can make for difficult viewing, but these new shows offer a satisfying combination of suspense, friction and the search for truth.

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The evolution of police interrogations on screen - The Economist