Police Interviews

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Police Interviews

Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger W. Shuy
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Performance Errors ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
The Government ◽  
Speech Events

Much is written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and undercover targets use ambiguous language in their interactions with police, prosecutors, and undercover agents. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations demonstrating how police, prosecutors, undercover agents, and complainants use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects, which leads to misrepresentations of the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. These misrepresentations affect the perceptions of judges and juries about the subjects’ motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional performance errors. Although perhaps overreliance on Grice’s maxim of sincerity leads some to believe this, interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law are adversarial, non-cooperative events that enable participants to ignore or violate the cooperative principle. One effective way the government does this is to use ambiguity deceptively. Later listeners to the recordings of such conversations may not recognize this ambiguity and react in ways that the subjects may not have intended. Deceptive ambiguity is clearly intentional in undercover operations and the case examples illustrate that the practice also is alive and well in police interviews and prosecutorial questioning. The book concludes with a summary of how the deceptive ambiguity used by representatives of the government affected the perception of the subjects’ predisposition, intentionality and voluntariness, followed by a comparison of the relative frequency of deceptive ambiguity used by the government in its representations of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar.

Strategic Sequences in Police Interviews and the Importance of Order and Cultural Fit

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (9) ◽  
pp. 934-954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karlijn Beune ◽  
Ellen Giebels ◽  
Wendi L. Adair ◽  
Bob M. Fennis ◽  
Karen I. Van Der Zee
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Nonsignificant Trend ◽  
Cultural Fit ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Listening Behavior ◽  
Relational Behavior ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Reversed Order ◽  
Rational Arguments

This study introduces the concept of strategic sequences to police interviews and concentrates on the impact of active listening behavior and rational arguments. To test the authors’ central assumption that the effectiveness of strategic sequences is dependent on cultural fit (i.e., the match with the cultural background of suspects), young people participated in virtual police interviews. Study 1 demonstrated that contrast sequences accentuating rational rather than relational behavior were found to be effective in eliciting information and admissions from suspects originating from cultures that tend to use more direct and content-oriented communication (i.e., low-context cultures), whereas for suspects from cultures that use more indirect and context-oriented communication (i.e., high-context cultures) a nonsignificant trend in reversed order was found. Study 2 added the investigation of the joint impact of active listening and rational arguments. In line with predictions, the results showed that an active listening—rational arguments sequence is most effective when active listening behavior precedes— rather than follows—rational arguments.

Interpreted Police Interviews: A Review of Contemporary Research

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-136
Author(s):  
Jane Goodman-Delahunty ◽  
Natalie Martschuk ◽  
Sandra B. Hale ◽  
Susan E. Brandon
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Police Interviews

scholarly journals Interpreting meaning in police interviews: Applied Language Typology in a Forensic Linguistics context

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luna Filipovic ◽  
Alberto Hijazo Gascón
Keyword(s):  
Professional Practices ◽  
Motion Events ◽  
Forensic Linguistics ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Legal Contexts ◽  
Semantic Typology

The main aim of this paper is to raise awareness about the importance of language contrasts in legal interpreting contexts. The semantic typology of motion events put forward by Talmy (1991, 2000) and its implications for discourse and narrative (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004, 2005) are used as an example of how an applied typology approach can be useful for the analysis of language contrasts in a forensic linguistics context. Applied Language Typology (Filipović 2008, 2017a, b) is used here to analyse transcriptions of police interviews that were mediated by an English-Spanish interpreter in California (USA) and an English-Portuguese interpreter in Norfolk (UK). The results of this analysis demonstrate that certain differences in semantic components of motion such as Manner, Cause and Deixis can lead interpreters to add, omit or modify the content of a message in the process of translation. This leads us to conclude that professional practices such as the production of bilingual transcripts and use of control interpreters, together with the inclusion of Applied Language Typology in interpreting training, would improve the quality of interpreting practices in legal contexts.

scholarly journals Evidence-gathering in police interviews

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luna Filipović
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Investigative Interviewing ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Communication Difficulties ◽  
Evidence Gathering ◽  
Police Interrogations ◽  
The Many

Abstract 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.

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