As noted in the introduction, independently of the ACIA meeting, two senior Norwegian police officers who were intimately involved in investigating the terror attacks discussed the case at John Jay College on November 19 in a seminar program supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. One speaker was Police Superintendent Asbjørn Rachlew of the Oslo Police District, who created the investigative interviewing training program for the Norwegian police and was an adviser to the team that interviewed Breivik for many, many hours over a seven-month period after the attack. The second speaker, Chief Inspector Geir-Egil Løken of the Criminal Investigation Department, was one of the three interviewers.
In the John Jay seminar, Rachlew spoke about the evolution and underlying principles of Norwegian police interviewing methods and the strategy employed in questioning Breivik. Løken described the actual interview experience. Both generously agreed to have their presentations included in this report.
Opening the session, Rachlew told his audience that using the word “interview,” rather than “interrogate,” is deliberate and meaningful. Interrogation is intended to get a suspect to confess, by persuasion or manipulation. Investigative interviewing is explicitly not aimed at a confession. Its purpose, as practiced by Norwegian police, is “to gather reliable and accurate information in order to discover the truth about matters under investigation…. the objective is not to obtain a confession from someone already presumed in the eyes of the interviewing officer to be guilty.”*
