ABSTRACT
The legitimization of police interrogations under the Judges’ Rules and associated judicial rulings may be understood as a concomitant of the general acceptance of the police as the cardinal agent of law enforcement. This chapter discusses the specific and instrumental images of the police, police work and the policed may be discerned in this particular context and evaluate their potency and utility within the prosecution process that obtained prior to the changes introduced by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984 (PACE). The images of defendants identified in the survey as frequently appearing in police interrogation records may be brought within four broad though not mutually exclusive categories. The categories comprise those cases in which defendants, while detained as suspects, are depicted as being: defiant and or confident; unequivocally guilty; or artful. The unequivocally guilty detainee appears with considerable frequency in the sample of interrogation records drawn from the pre-PACE era.
