Forensic psychologist who worked to improve the criminal justice system
Barrie Irving, who has died aged 70, spent more than four decades as a forensic psychologist working to improve police services and the criminal justice system. He played a crucial role in reforming the pre-trial procedures of the English and Welsh system. His research on police interrogations in the late 1970s shone a spotlight on previously ignored psychological aspects of the behaviour of suspects and police during interrogations. It was carried out in a decade when police were given no training on questioning suspects and the judges' rules that were designed to secure fair procedures did not possess the force of law and were frequently ignored. Among other things, Irving established that the concept of voluntary confession was an oxymoron in conditions of custodial interrogation. A confession could not be voluntary under conditions in which the police controlled what a suspect ate and drank, and what information he received.
This work was triggered by the 1972 Maxwell Confait case, during which three youths, one aged 18 but affected by learning disabilities, and two others aged 15 and 14, made confessions at a police station, two to murdering Confait, and all three to setting fire to the house where he lived. They had been interrogated at a police station without a solicitor or an adult friend present. All three were convicted and ended up in different forms of secure accommodation for three years.
Some time later, two men serving sentences for other crimes confessed to killing Confait. When the appeal court belatedly quashed the original convictions, Sir Henry Fisher was asked to conduct an inquiry. Irving helped Fisher and in the subsequent royal commission on criminal procedure (1978-81) was assigned to carry out observations of police interrogations. He studied 76, involving 60 suspects, in a Brighton police station and found that 35 of the suspects made self-incriminating admissions and another four confessed after the interviews ended. He identified 165 different tactics used by the police to obtain confessions.
The report from the royal commission resulted in the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which introduced a comprehensive and enforceable code of conduct covering all aspects of police investigations. It required that all interrogations should be tape-recorded and that special procedures be introduced for vulnerable suspects.
A year later, the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act removed the responsibility of the police for the prosecution of offences and handed it to a new independent agency, the Crown Prosecution Service. This was in line with Irving's findings that the main purpose of police interrogations was to obtain a confession. Once this was achieved, it was frequently the case that no further investigation of possible suspects was pursued. Irving was commissioned to repeat his research exercise once the new system was bedded in. By 1986 the number of manipulative tactics used by the police in interrogation had dropped to 42.
Irving was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of a fine bone china manufacturer. He went to school at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and then to Pembroke College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in social anthropology. He took his master's degree in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s and then returned to the UK to become a research fellow at the Tavistock Institute in London.
There he set up the first non-medical forensic psychology research group in the UK, focusing on suspected miscarriages of justice, including that of the Guildford Four. His work for the 1978-81 royal commission brought him to the attention of senior police officers, who saw him as a critical but constructive friend. This helped him become the founding director in 1979 of the thinktank the Police Foundation, where he stayed until 2005.
Among Irving's special qualities, which made his time at the foundation a celebrated period, were his intellectual curiosity and his capacity to raise funds. He developed research collaborations with police forces in six European nations and hosted pan-European conferences on drug control and neighbourhood policing. In the 1990s he steered the foundation's research into the forensic use of IT. He initiated the first research and development projects in the UK on automatic crime mapping and facial recognition. He also made it a base for independent commissions, the most renowned of which, the Runciman inquiry on the misuse of drugs law, rebooted a national debate on the state of British drug policies. For this latter initiative, he raised £500,000 from seven major charities to fund the work.
In 2005 he returned as a visiting fellow to the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge, where he had taken his PhD in forensic psychology in 1990. In 2006 he joined Matrix Knowledge Group, a London consultancy, as an adviser on policing and security issues, and three years later moved to Rand Europe, based in Cambridge. His work there included an independent assessment of Europol, work for the European commission on the European Enforcement Order and a widely praised report on criminal asset confiscation.
For journalists interested in policing issues, he was a dream contact – his conversation fizzed with ideas, research findings, witty anecdotes, memorable quotes and interesting paradoxes. But he was not completely focused on criminal justice. He was an excellent pianist and good guitar player. He enjoyed golf. He collaborated with the Action for Children charity on children who run away from home and explored ways of providing better protection against child pornography and chatrooms being used to groom vulnerable teenagers.
He was an early supporter of the National Stepfamily Association, a counselling and advice centre, where he had a special interest. Irving was married three times; and his third wife, Tricia, had also been previously married. She survives him, along with three children, four stepchildren, three grandchildren and 10 step-grandchildren.
• Barrie Irving, forensic psychologist, born 6 October 1942; died 20 February 2013