PEACE
Definition
Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, Evaluation: the five-stage interview framework adopted in England and Wales from 1992, used for both witnesses and suspects, with information gathering as its primary goal.
- Stages
- Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, Evaluation
- Adopted
- England and Wales, from 1992
- Applies to
- Both witnesses and suspects
- Primary goal
- Information gathering
Common questions
How does PEACE differ from confession-focused interrogation approaches?+
PEACE treats the interview as an information-gathering exercise rather than a process aimed at securing a confession or admission, using open questions and structured account-taking, whereas accusatorial approaches are built around persuading a suspect to admit guilt.
Why does PEACE include a formal Evaluation stage after the interview ends?+
The Evaluation stage requires the interviewer to review the interview's outcome against the investigation's objectives, checking whether the account obtained is consistent with other evidence and whether further inquiries are needed, which builds a feedback loop rather than treating the interview as a one-off event.
Related terms
- Cognitive Interview (CI)
- An evidence-based interview technique developed by Fisher and Geiselman that uses memory-enhancement strategies including mental reinstatement of context, free recall, temporal variation,...
- Encoding Specificity
- Tulving's principle that memory retrieval is most effective when the retrieval context matches the encoding context. Mental reinstatement of context is a...
- Free Recall
- The CI phase in which a witness reports everything they can remember without interruption or directing questions from the interviewer, producing a...
- Mental Reinstatement of Context
- A CI technique in which the witness is asked to mentally return to the setting of the event, imagining what they saw,...
- Misinformation Effect
- The incorporation of misleading post-event information into the original memory trace, documented by Loftus and Palmer (1974) and subsequent studies. Distinguished from...