The Flaws with Good Cop, Bad Cop and Why Rapport Gets Results (Part 2)

Jim Smyth recently retired as a Superintendent with the Ontario Provincial Police.  Much of his 35-year career was dedicated to the investigation and management of complex violent and serial crimes.

In addition to successfully managing hundreds of complex investigations, Jim was certified by the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship (ICIAF) as a criminal profiler. The ICIAF is an elite group of law enforcement professionals that include the FBI and several national and state police agencies that are called upon to provide support in the most challenging investigations.  He was also certified as a forensic interviewer through the Canadian Police College.

​Jim�s passion in policing has been to refine and improve the process of forensic interviewing.  His accomplishments in high-profile investigations have earned him international recognition as an expert is rapport-based, modern interview approaches.

He has spent much of the past twenty years providing support, innovative training, and guidance to law enforcement agencies around the world.  Examples of his interviews are routinely used in police academies, law schools, and university programs to demonstrate how rapport-based approaches to high-stakes interviews can yield reliable, court-admissible results without using outdated and unreliable coercive techniques.

For the last five years of his police career, Jim was the Superintendent, Director of Operations for the OPP�s Central Region, overseeing approximately one thousand uniform, crime unit, traffic, marine, and emergency response team personnel.

Jim�s accomplishments in the area of forensic interviewing have earned him six OPP Accolade Awards, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and he was inducted into the Order of Merit of the Police Forces by Canada�s Governor General.

Frances Surmon-B�hr (PhD) is a research associate at the University of Liverpool and a consultant psychologist at Protagoras Forensic Services Ltd.

Her PhD, supervised by Prof. Laurence Alison, examined rapport-based interviewing approaches with High Value Suspects. She has worked on numerous research projects funded by U.K. Ministry of Defense and the U.S. High Value Detainee Interrogation Group where she was involved in the design, development, analysis, and write-up of research projects relating the application of the ORBIT model of interviewing to various interviewing/ interrogation contexts.

As part of this work, she has observed and coded hundreds of hours of interviews with terrorist suspects, covering a range of ideologies including Al Qaeda, Extreme Right-Wing, and ISIS.

​Frances has provided training to a wide range of organizations including the FBI/CIA/DoD, The UK�s National Counter Terrorism interviewing cadre, and the British Army in the ORBIT framework for rapport-based interrogation methods.

​Frances has presented at Humanitarian, Human Rights, Law Enforcement, and Security Conferences internationally.

Emily Alison has worked as a behavioral consultant psychologist for the last 20 years, providing treatment in both the criminal justice sector and in the community. She is the managing director of Protagoras Forensic Services Ltd and a research associate at the University of Liverpool.

She specializes in the assessment and treatment of violence and has worked with over 850 domestic violence perpetrators and designed therapeutic interventions for Domestic Abuse, Child to Parent Violence, Healthy Relationships for Children and Young People, Sexually Harmful Behavior and Sexual Risk Taking in Adolescents, and Gang and Weapon linked offending.

For the last 13 years she has been involved in the development of the Preventing Violent Extremism Tool for profiling potential extremism and co-developed the ORBIT framework for Advanced High Value Detainee Interviewing. She has observed over 500 hours of UK police interviews with terrorists, covering a range of ideologies including Paramilitary, Al Qaeda, Right-wing, and ISIS.

Emily has provided training to a wide range of organizations including the FBI/CIA/DoD, The UKs National Counter Terrorism interviewing cadre and the British Army in the ORBIT framework for rapport-based interrogation methods.