2 Planning topics for Neale’s interview
The planning and preparation part of the PEACE model (among other things) involves making a written plan of the interview, including important topics and potential questions.
In the following activity you will start to make your own plan for the interview of Neale.
Activity 1
Imagine that you will be working with Sund and Bullet, helping them to prepare for the interview.
Topics
Think about the different topics you might want to explore with Neale. Your timeline might give you useful information to go on here. You will notice that in the PEACE model, the A stands for ‘Account, clarify and challenge’ and bearing in mind that you are planning for the first suspect interview, you will want to concentrate more on the ‘account’ aspects (rather than the clarify and challenge aspects which might come later on in the interview if they are considered relevant). You will need to decide which you feel are the topics you would like to question Neale about. Asking for the account essentially means getting the suspect to give their account of what they were doing, and their involvement (or lack of involvement) in the crime in question.
Questions
Within each topic, think about the most important questions that you want to ask. Don’t worry about how you will phrase these questions as you will move on to this shortly. At this stage concentrate on the content of the question.
HINT: by topic, we mean a broad area of interest, for example one topic might be Neale’s previous relationship with his father, and three questions within that topic might be:
- How would Neale describe his relationship with his father?
- How close was the relationship between Neale and his father?
- Would he describe the relationship as problematic?
Make a plan of the topics and questions you might like to cover. Make a record of your plan either digitally or just note it on a piece of paper.