2020/07/30 by Jordan Nunan, Ian Stanier, Rebecca Milne +3 · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Deception detection and forensic psychology #Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending #Stalking, Cyberstalking, and Harassment
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/13218719.2020.1784807
openalex publication_date 2020/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/22
Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) provide unique access to criminals and organised crime groups, and their collection of intelligence is vital to understanding England and Wales' threat picture. Rapport is essential to the establishment and maintenance of effective professional relationships between source handlers and their CHIS. Thus, rapport-based interviewing is a fundamental factor to maximising intelligence yield. The present research gained unprecedented access to 105 real-life audio recorded telephone interactions between England and Wales police source handlers and CHIS. This research quantified both the rapport component behaviours (e.g., attention, positivity, and coordination) displayed by the source handler and the intelligence yielded from the CHIS, in order to investigate the frequencies of these rapport components and their relationship to intelligence yield. Overall rapport, attention and coordination significantly correlated with intelligence yield, while positivity did not. Attention was the most frequently used component of rapport, followed by positivity, and then coordination.