Informant handling is easy ... It's just talking to people!

How often have you heard something like that? That handling informants, getting actionable operational intelligence from other humans, is easy. Because it's just "talking to people".

Well, I was fortunate enough to conduct a survey with real life police informant handlers, and the results make it clear - handling informants is not easy!

In fact, there are a number of interpersonal and organisational demands that the professional intelligence interviewer has to manage, and they aren't always compatible. For example, the interviewer may need to maintain a friendly rapport based relationship with the informant, but at the same time they have to somehow try and detect any deception. They may be expected to obtain detailed accounts of actionable intelligence, but can't do this until they have gained their informants cooperation.

Managing these competing demands requires a bespoke interview model that adopts a holistic approach to the handler-informant interaction, and that's what led me to design the R-WITS-US interview model, which I describe in detail in my book, Interviewing Police Informants: A Practitioner's Guide.

The results of my survey are also available open access, and can be found here.