Eye-Witness Identification Procedures and Stress: A Comparison of Live and Video Identification Parades

Abstract

Recent amendments to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 of England and Wales, allow video identification parades to be employed as the primary mechanism to collect identification evidence. One important difference between the video procedure and the more established live identification parade is that the video procedure does not require the witness to come face to face with the perpetrator, and this may therefore reduce any stress experienced by the witness. A field experiment was conducted to compare the experiences of participant-witnesses attending both a video and a live identification parade. Approximately 70 per cent of participant-witnesses judged attending the live parade to have been more stressful than the video parade. However, analysis of responses to a mood adjective checklist revealed no statistically significant differences in the stress or arousal experienced after attending the live and the video parade. In relation to video parades, participant-witnesses who believed that the perpetrator was not present reported significantly lower levels of stress than those who believed that the perpetrator was present in the parade. There was no such difference in the case of live parades.