05/01/2026
Tabitha White
By Ciara Placentino
The Reid technique is pioneered by Inabu, Reid and Buckley (1986) in their police training manual, detailing how deception and guilt can be detected using a variety of positive and negative reinforcing techniques, such as minimisation, leading questions, analysing body language, and false promises, whilst isolating the suspect for great lengths of time to increase their desire to escape. One example of this is the case of the exonerated five, where 5 young men were falsely imprisoned for the rape of a jogger in Central Park. The Netflix series, ‘When they see us’, depicts the interrogation process the boys went through, where police used the Reid technique. This technique has since been proven to largely contribute to false confessions and the conviction of innocent suspects.
In the case of the central park jogger, the police lied and told the boys they had witnesses connecting them to the crime. Kassin and Kiechel (1996) found 94% of people will give a false confession when someone else said they witnessed it. The police also used minimisation to sympathise and justify the crime in attempt to get the boys to confess; they are shown in ‘When they see us’, saying “you seem like a good kid. You just got caught going up with the wrong group”. Kassin and McNall (1991) found minimisation tactics can make the accused assume they will be sentenced leniently if they comply with police. These techniques tend to be even more aggressive when officers presume the suspects are guilty, as they base their success of the investigation on whether they get a confession, however humans have been shown to only have 54% accuracy in judgements of deception and guilt, with little to no difference in accuracy by police officers (Snyder & Swan, 1978; Bond & DePaulo, 2006). Worryingly, other studies have found police officers have lower accuracy rates than non-police and made more guilty judgments whilst being more confident in their abilities (Kassin et. al, 2005). This was demonstrated in ‘When they see us’, as detectives determined the boys were lying when they were actually innocent.
False confessions are made more likely to be believed by juries, as 95% include specific details about the crime, which must have been communicated by police to the accused during interrogations (Garrett, 2009). Although police denied sharing details of the crime in 96% of cases, Garrett suggests some police may not even realise they have fed suspects information. For the exonerated five, the police told the boys each other’s names to get them to incriminate each other, even though most of them had never met before. Police explained a scratch on one of the boy’s face was due to the victim “scratched him when she was fighting him off” and the boys then later included this in their statements.
False confessions are most common in adolescents due to developmental differences, such as increased dopamine during puberty heightening reward-seeking behaviours and an undeveloped pre-frontal cortex which encourages impulsive decision making based on short-term goals. Making compliant false confessions helps juveniles achieve the short-term benefit of escaping interrogations rather than focusing on the long-term consequences; the exonerated five were told, “the sooner you tell us what you know, the sooner you go home”.
Typically, interrogations take under 2 hours, however interrogations resulting in false confessions take 12-24 hours in 39% of cases (Drizin & Leo, 2003). Lengthy interrogations can be even more difficult for juveniles, who struggle with time- perception and future orientation, and particularly struggle with decision making when fatigued. In the central park jogger case, the boys underwent 14-30 hours of non-stop interrogation, of which the consequential exhaustion further motivated them to confess. Given the aforementioned differences between adult and adolescent brains and decision making, it is even more concerning that research has found police use the same interrogation techniques with juveniles as they do with adults (Cleary & Warner, 2016).
In summary, the exonerated five were convicted for a crime they didn’t commit based on false confessions that were coerced by police using the Reid technique. These were made more likely by underdeveloped risk and reward pathways in the brain typical of adolescents, the extreme lengths of their interrogations, and the lack of accuracy of deception detection by police. Whilst the Reid technique is illegal in the UK, it is still used elsewhere, and officers may use it without even being taught it. It is therefore vital we continue to educate ourselves and learn from past mistakes.