Pragmatics and Society - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019

In this paper I discuss the many complexities that police officers have to deal with in their communication with suspects. Investigative interviewing is a very complex communicative situation in itself, with a number of different psychological and sociological variables at play during each interview. In addition, suspect interviews bring about an additional dimension of complexity, which is driven by the fact that a basic principle of conversation, cooperation (Grice 1975) is often not respected and is sometimes severely and purposefully violated, for example when suspects are guilty and want to obscure that very fact or when they believe that their situation would worsen if they cooperated with the police. A further layer of complexity is added when the interviews are carried out via an interpreter, where the fact that the officer and the suspect speak different languages during the interview creates additional barriers to straightforward communication.

In the present paper, I identify a number of points at which communication difficulties are encountered in this highly sensitive legal context. For this purpose, I analyse authentic interview datasets provided by two UK police constabularies, and also make comparisons with examples from transcripts of authentic US police interrogations. In addition, I highlight the issues that arise when professional interpretation is not available and when bilingual police officers assume the dual role of investigator-interpreter. Finally, I suggest possible solutions that can help remove the hurdles standing in the way of efficient and accurate gathering of communication evidence.

Quotation and reflective interpretation of previous statements are common features in police interviews. Of particular importance is the uncovering of apparent contradictions between earlier and current responses in interviews of suspects. Conflicting statements can be used by officers as triggers to elicit new responses that explain inconsistencies. In linguistic pragmatics, such reflective commenting on utterances is categorised as metacommunication, i.e. ‘communication about communication’, which includes metarepresentation, i.e. second-order representation of another representation through some form of quotation. Such instances of metacommunication are key instances of negotiating the communicative interests of its chief participants, which in suspect interviews consist on the one hand in the interviewers’ purpose of establishing grounds for a potential criminal charge and, on the other hand, the interviewee’s interest in avoiding such a charge. This article analyses exemplary cases of metacommunication in multilingual police interviews from the perspective of quotation pragmatics. The results suggest that police interview training should pay special attention to this area in order to optimise cognitive results.

The aim of investigative interviews is to gather comprehensive and reliable information from suspects, offenders, victims and witnesses through questioning. Research on questioning during police interviews has mainly explored question types and question approaches when interviewing adults and children. This paper is concerned with so far unexplored aspects of police interviewing, that is the employment of mitigating and aggravating linguistic devices in questions and statements and their pragmatic effects. The corpus consists of six police interviews with suspects of crime. Mitigation and aggravation strategies were extracted and a total of eighty-two instances were found, analysed and classified into a categorisation taxonomy which was designed to ascertain the types and functions of mitigation and aggravation devices. The findings reveal that more mitigation than aggravation strategies were used in police questioning and statements during the interviews. Mitigation was found to be used not only as a device for alleviating or attenuating, but also as a strategy to build rapport between suspects and police officers.

Police interview interpreting is a complex task, as interpreters make difficult choices under pressure and time constraints. The main dilemma of the interpreter is whether to remain faithful to the original text, with the risk of rendering non-idiomatic translations, or to give preference to more idiomatic versions that may entail an addition or an omission from the original text. This article presents an analysis of Spanish-English bilingual police interviews in California. The analysis is based on the discrepancies found between an interpreter present in the interrogation and a control interpreter who translates the whole interview post-hoc. This is an original methodology that can be used for future research in this and other contexts. The results show different types of inaccuracies in the interpretation, which can be attributed to contextual pressures and overall challenges of interpreting and to challenges related to typological differences between the two languages involved.

Both research and police guidelines acknowledge the value of rapport-building in police interview with suspects (ISs) and provide some insight into how ‘rapport’ may be defined and built in this context. Rapport is, however, difficult to operationalise and assess in practice, other than for the routine legal clarification offered to suspects at the beginning of the interview. This paper takes an original discourse-pragmatic and ethnographic approach to investigating the forms that rapport takes in a sample of authentic ISs, with particular reference to two dimensions, empathy and face. The article discusses the value and suitability of the identified empathic and ‘face’-relevant expressions with respect to current interview aims and practice. The discussion highlights the underlying bi-functionality of rapport in ISs, demonstrating how the two functions may be reconciled in police interview training and practice.

In the context of interpreter-assisted police interviews (IAPIs) it is essential for both police officers and interpreters to maintain impartiality at all times. However, there are numerous obstacles on the way towards achieving this fundamental goal. The present study examines whether and how the different conflicts in communication are constructed and controlled within the different phases of police interviews, using a self-administered questionnaire that explores the perceptions of police officers and interpreters. Three areas of conflict pertinent to impartiality were identified: role, trust and emotion. The differing assumptions about the roles of police officers and interpreters, and the respective differing expectations, appear to create barriers in the achievement of trust and in the working relationship as a whole, which may well affect the aim of IAPIs (i.e. to gather reliable information) and alter the interview outcomes. In addition, both police officers and interpreters have strong emotional experiences during IAPIs; however, neither group appear to make conscious efforts to engage in coping strategies.