The Discourse of Police Interviews

Marianne Mason, Frances Rock, Marianne Mason, Frances Rock

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226647821
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Forensic linguistics, or the study of language and the law, is a growing field of scholarly and public interest with an established research presence. The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by analyzing how police interviews are constructed and used to investigate and prosecute crimes.The first book to focus exclusively on the discourses of police interviewing, The Discourse of Police Interviews examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Among other topics, the book explores the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as PEACE and Reid, and the discursive practices of institutional representatives like police officers and interpreters that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence. Together, the contributions situate the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process. The book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, such as linguistic anthropology, interpreting studies, criminology, law, and sociology.

Chapter One

Introduction

Marianne Mason

Wisdom is not acquired save as the result of investigation.

—Sara Teasdale

The Discourse of Police Interviews

Language and the law/forensic linguistics (FL) is a growing field with an established research presence. To date, books on language and the law have predominantly ranged from those designed to introduce the field (e.g., Levi and Walker 1990; Gibbons 1994; Cotterill 2002; Olsson 2004; Kredens and Goźdź-Roszkowski 2007; Gibbons and Turell 2008); those aimed at summarizing (to a greater or lesser extent) the breadth, and applications, of the study of language and the law (e.g., Conley and O’Barr 1998; Tiersma 1999; Gibbons 2003; Coulthard and Johnson 2010); and those focused on one part or aspect of the legal system in greater detail (e.g., Conley and O’Barr 1990; Solan 1993; Komter 1998; Shuy 1998, 2005, 2014, 2017; Ehrlich 2001; Heydon 2005; Solan and Tiersma 2005; Maryns 2006; Rock 2007; Berk-Seligson 2009; Heffer, Rock, and Conley 2013; Ehrlich, Eades, and Ainsworth, 2016). The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by focusing exclusively on how police interviews are discursively constructed and institutionally used to investigate and prosecute crimes.

This volume examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Furthermore, the volume aims to promote dialogue not only between scholars who specialize in language and the law, but also among scholars in cognate disciplines, such as linguistic anthropology, criminology, law, and sociology, to name a few. To this end, the volume explores themes including the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview methods, such as PEACE and Reid, the role of the discursive practices of institutional representatives (e.g., police officers, interpreters) in bringing about (or not) linguistic transformations, and the impact that these transformations can have on the construction and evidential quality and value of linguistic evidence.1

Framing the Police Interview

The police interview is an essential component of “the construction of proof” (Baldwin 1993) in the investigation (and prosecution) of a crime. The process of “constructing proof” discursively has been examined through a myriad of research perspectives, ranging from institutional, psychological, ethnolinguistic, and metalinguistic. For the benefit of the reader, this section will frame the key concepts that are particularly relevant to, and addressed in, the chapters of this volume.

The Language of Institutions

Institutional talk is task related and involves at least one participant who represents a formal organization. As Drew and Heritage (1992) note this type of discourse is not determined by context alone but rather created through the interaction itself. A feature of creating institutional talk is the role of asymmetries of knowledge in interaction, such as those between professional and lay actors. Drew (1991) suggests that unequal distribution of knowledge is a source of asymmetry in institutional talk, or what Linell and Luckmann (1991) describe as “inequivalences” of knowledge between interactants. Linell and Luckmann put forth conditions for dialogue that may give rise to asymmetries, such as differences in rights to develop topics and differences between interactants regarding their knowledge of each other and their level of access to knowledge (1991: 5–6). In institutional settings, such as legal ones, these inequivalences may hinge on both individual and sociocultural factors:

patterns of asymmetry or dominance are generated in actual social intercourse. Some of these patterns may be dependent on properties of individuals. . . , and some on roles tied to the professions, organizations, social strata, etc. It is important to emphasize that whether asymmetries or symmetries are actually found, these are not merely expression of individual intentions or motives. There are also social structures and traditions “speaking through actors.” (Linell and Luckmann 1991: 9)

Asymmetries in discourse may also represent an interactant’s dominance in an exchange (which mirrors society’s institutional structures) and may include interactants’ strive for mutuality in understanding. As Maynard eloquently notes, discourse asymmetry “may have an institutional mooring, but also an interactional bedrock, and the latter needs sociological appreciation as much as the former” (1991: 486).

Finding a suitable definition for institutional discourse that includes both interactional and (socio) institutional features, however, has been challenging. More contemporary approaches have focused on the relationship between the interactants in an attempt to put forth a definition that accurately describes the exchange. Thornborrow (2002), for example, argues that institutional discourse is perhaps best defined as a local phenomenon in which the relationship between a participant’s current institutional role and his/her current discursive role “shapes the organisation and trajectory of the talk” (2002: 5). This definition of institutional discourse is also cautiously endorsed by Haworth (2006), who examined dynamics of asymmetries and power in police interviews.

Haworth argues that a working definition (and description) of institutional discourse needs to include “the interplay between the discursive and institutional roles of participants” (2006: 741), as well as their institutional identity and status. The latter also includes procedural and cognitive frameworks shared by institutional actors. This distinction is important since knowledge of legal principles and professional training/experience are traditionally within the domain of institutional, rather than lay actors. In custodial settings, as those examined in this volume, lay knowledge of institutional procedures is often not sufficient for lay persons to navigate successfully the procedural frameworks that may be applied to them.

Ethnolinguistics and Discursive Psychology

In addition to the social and institutional moorings of police interviews, ethnolinguistic and psychological factors also play a role in shaping the dynamics (and possible legal outcomes) of these types of exchanges. Research on police interviews that include non–native speakers of English, for example, has shown that interpreters (even professionally trained ones) make changes that may affect power negotiations between police and suspects (Berk-Seligson 2009; Nakane 2014). These changes, as Berk-Seligson (2009) finds, may also cross an ethical and legal line when police officers conduct interviews without using a professional interpreter; instead opting to act as both interpreters and interviewers. Other research in the field has shown that interpreters who possess professional and/or linguistic competency, but not a cultural understanding of the community for which they are interpreting may also have an impact on how the members of a community are treated in the justice system (Eades 1995). More recently, a group of researchers proposed a set of guidelines for the reading of the waiver/caution to non–native speakers of English (see Communication of Rights Group 2016). These guidelines state that to ensure the protection of individual rights and the integrity of an investigation factors such as, level of education, cognitive abilities, context, and wording used to invoke individual rights must be considered when questioning both native and, particularly, a special type of vulnerable population: non-native speakers of English.

Psychology as a discipline has also investigated extensively the police interview. This field has traditionally focused on practitioner-oriented analysis (Clarke and Milne 2001; Bull and Milne 2004), detection of deceit (Vrij, Mann, Kristen, and Fisher 2007), and confessions (Gudjonsson 2003). Much of the work in this field has been methodological and quantitative. The behavior of the interviewer and interviewee, rather than the interaction between the two, is the focus of most psychology based research on police interviews. Yet, research in discursive psychology has provided a more integrated approach in which “psychological themes such as motive and intent, agency and involvement, are managed as part of talk’s business” (Edwards 2005: 262). The focus of this type of analysis is to examine how emotions, attitudes, and ideas are constructed in social interaction observed in talk (Billig 1999).

In police interviews, a discursive psychological approach may provide insights into how perceptions of blame or responsibility are manifested in police-layperson exchanges. A number of chapters in this volume examine popular interview methods, such as PEACE and Reid, that use (to different extents) psychological principles such as empathy, minimization, and/or coercion (e.g., Mason 2013, 2016) to establish rapport with, and obtain information from, the interviewee.

Reported Speech, the Police Report, and Its Institutional Applications

Reported speech (RS) is the practice of “reporting. . . the words of other people” (Stokoe and Edwards 2007: 338). In police interviews, interviewers may employ RS to reorient interviewees to earlier topics that the interviewer wishes to probe further. Some common strategies include interviewer’s presenting alternatives to an interviewee’s version of events, reformulating an interviewee’s narrative in a more institutionally valuable way (Johnson 2008), and altering the interviewee’s words to slightly, but significantly, change his or her narrative of events (Haworth 2015). With this process of reorientation, the interviewee’s accounts may incur changes and transformations that potentially result in a skewed portrayal of events.

The reporting, or repeating/paraphrasing, of some verbiage which replays the prior interaction (Clift and Holt 2007) may also include multimodal cues (Matoesian and Gilbert 2018). Although emotions are widely studied in several disciplines, the interplay of different multimodal cues with linguistic cues is yet to be fully understood in actual conversation. Research on multimodality provides insights on the coordinated use of verbal expressions, prosodic cues, and embodied actions in everyday interactions. In police interviews, multimodal analysis has focused on how actions of settling on agreed evidential facts (such as blame allocation and moral evaluation) are accomplished through the coordination of the reported talk with bodily interaction such as posture, gesture, gaze, and the manipulation of objects. Gestures that accompany the reformulation of narrative facts in police interviews, for example, may dramatize the evidence and/or challenge the suspect’s narrative.

The police interview may also undergo transformations in the journey from oral to textual production. The police report is a written rendition of an interviewee’s story and an important institutional outcome of police interviews (e.g., Jönsson and Linell 1991; Haworth 2010). Research in the field has focused primarily on examining the transformations that occur in the writing of the police report, including the role of metalanguage, and the institutional applications of this type of discourse. With regard to discursive transformations, the police report may be written up as a summarized version of the talk in the record. The text may also become more formal and exclude side talk and other context of the interaction, such as how the police interview was interactionally negotiated and constructed. The police report, hence, is not simply the police officer’s verbatim account of the interviewee’s narrative during police questioning, but rather a type of negotiated, police-directed “storytelling.”

The role of metalanguage in the rendition of a police report is also key to understanding the complexity of this type of discourse. Metalanguage examines how individual’s “talk about talk” or what Maschler (1994) describes as the action of “metalanguaging.” As Maschler notes, “at the same time that the speaker is languaging about the world, he/she is also communicating information about how the utterance is intended; i.e., the speaker is metalanguaging—using language to communicate information about languaging” (330). Maschler adds that metalanguaging involves contextual constraints, such as linguistic structure, interpersonal relations, and medium of interaction. The function of metalanguage is also a strategic one, in which speakers orient addressees to their explanations of the speakers’ linguistic structures and intent. This process of directing and negotiating talk may result in linguistic transformations.

Olson (1991) notes that the analysis of oral metalanguage may be extended to writing. In police interviews, the textual transformations that occur between talk and text can be made explicit by metalanguage. The police officers’ use of metalanguage, for example, can express their decisions about what to write when they produce a report for witnesses, victims, or suspects of a crime. Metalanguage, and meaning making, in the writing of the police report produces (and reproduces) power asymmetries between the police interviewer and interviewee. Furthermore, the interviewee’s answers may be made to “fit” the police officer’s written construction of events to conform to the institutional demands of the text, such as its evidentiary uses in court. The interview, hence, may be reproduced and recontextualized from the interview room to the courtroom: a type of discursive “travel.” This is the case in countries such as the Netherlands where interviewees are normally not heard in court (e.g., van der Houwen and Sneijder 2014). The statements interviewees provide police officers (and the transformations that occur in the construction from talk to police report), as chapters in this volume explore, may be used instead as testimonial evidence to arrest and detain, prosecute, and, ultimately, obtain a conviction.

Overview of this Volume

The Discourse of Police Interviews is designed to provide the reader with a backstage view, if you will, of the discursive features and institutional applications of police interviews in various jurisdictions, such as in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States. Throughout the volume, the authors who are leading researchers in the field, both established and up-and-coming, consider the discursive features of cases in which police officers conduct interviews. The chapters inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Conventions
• chapter 1. Introduction
• Section I. The Discourse of Reid and PEACE
• Section II. Police Interview Dynamics and Negotiation
• Section III. Discursive Transformations in Bilingual Police Interviews
• Section IV. The Discursive Journey and Institutional Applications of Police Interviews
• Index