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The purpose of this paper is to examine how police authority – in its “soft” form – is used and understood by staff and detainees in police custody in England, examining how these meanings are shaped by this unique police setting. It is argued that the nature of this setting, as fraught and uncertain, along with the large volume of citizens who come into contact with the police therein, makes police custody the ultimate “teachable moment”.

The present paper is based on in-depth qualitative data collected between March 2014 and May 2015 in four custody suites (in four forces). In each site, the researchers spent three to four weeks observing and then interviewed 10-15 staff (largely police officers, detention officers but also a few other criminal justice practitioners) and 10-15 detainees. In total, the paper is based on 532 hours of observing and 97 interviews (47 with staff and 50 with detainees).

One way that the staff used their authority in the custody suites in the research was softly and innocuously; this entailed for example staff communicating in a respectful manner with detainees, such as by being deliberately polite. The authors conclude that this “soft” power was a dynamic, processual matter, shaped in particular by the physical conditions of the suite, the uncertain and insecure nature of detainees’ circumstances, as well as by the sense of disempowerment they felt as a result of being deprived of their liberty and autonomy, all of which contributed to police custody being the ultimate “teachable moment”.

The paper draws on a range of qualitative data collected from both staff and detainees in four types of police custody suites as part the “good” police custody study. It therefore makes an original contribution to the field which has tended to rely on cross-sectional surveys of citizens not policed populations (Harkin, 2015; Worden and Mclean, 2017).

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate to the academic and research audience the legal implications for suspects who are interviewed under caution for historical allegations, when the suspect’s responses rely on episodic memory recall.

The paper is a review of a multi-disciplinary literature base, necessary to understand the problem with the qualified right to silence.

The findings suggest that more research work is needed in order to be able to assess the difficulties for a suspect faced with answering questions of an episodic nature and the subsequent implications for the defendant once on trial. Implications: the current situation can lead to miscarriages of justice, which are difficult to rectify.

This paper brings together a number of sub sections of disciplines from criminal law, criminology, forensic psychology, and mainstream psychology (i.e. memory work) to identify a potentially serious problem for preventing miscarriages of justice with the current system of qualified rights to silence whilst being interviewed under caution in the case of historical allegations.