News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Law enforcement officers chat on Friday, the last day of a three day training session focused on learning forensic interviewing of children protocol. The training took place at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Alpena.

ALPENA — Earlier this week, police personnel from Alpena County’s law enforcement agencies participated in a three-day training session learning the proper protocol for forensic interviews of children.

State law requires anyone that interviews children of suspected child abuse or neglect take the training through the Prosecuting Attorney’s Association of Michigan (PAAM), Julie Knop, director of PAAM’s child abuse unit, said on Friday.

“Anyone that’s in law enforcement or CPS has to come through this training eventually,” Knop said. “This is super beneficial to your community.”

On the first day of training, officers learned the proper protocol for interviewing children and they put that into practice during mock interviews the next two days.

The goal of a forensic interview is to obtain a statement from a child–in a developmentally sensitive and unbiased manner–to support accurate and fair decision-making in the criminal justice and child welfare systems, the introduction to the Forensic Interviewing Protocol fifth edition states.

The protocol informs officials how to provide a socially supportive environment for children. That environment is created through body language, conversation, and physical appearance. For instance, the introduction states that officers should avoid wearing uniforms or having firearms visible while interviewing a child.

The protocol also offers some examples of conversation, like expressing interest in the child by asking how they are doing, and showing empathy with sayings like, ‘I know it’s been a long interview.’

Alpena County Prosecuting Attorney Cynthia Muszynski said that at the monthly meetings of the Child’s Advocacy Center of Northeast Michigan –which serves Presque Isle, Montmorency, Alpena, and Alcona counties–there was a lot of interest in hosting the training locally.

“Law enforcement agencies are strapped for employees, so when they have to send somebody overnight to a training, it’s expensive, and it takes officers off the road,” Muszynski said. “So hosting it here in Alpena helps all the officers get here.”

Elizabeth Jones, a forensic interviewer and family advocate at the children’s advocacy center said that this type of forensic interview is typically done weekly, but there’s an ebb and a flow.

“They needed more individuals to be trained in the specific forensic interviewing process so that way they could do it on the spot in case the children’s advocacy center wasn’t available in those moments to make sure that they did the interview correctly without tainting the investigation,” Muszynski said.

“It’s important, for all the reasons that forensic interviews are important, specifically to be able to have officers and law enforcement get down to what is the truth of every event,” Muszynski said. “So that way we are able to prosecute things more efficiently.”