ABSTRACT
Significant developments in police interviewing practice in the UK have been fuelled by psychological research. Studies have acknowledged the coercive and oppressive features of the traditional adversarial police interrogation (Shepherd 1991; Mortimer 1994; Moston and Stephenson 1993; Williamson 1993) and given rise to the ethical PEACE investigative interview, the rationale for which is outlined in A Practical Guide to Investigative Interviewing (National Crime Faculty 2000). In addition to the PEACE protocol of inviting suspects, witnesses and victims of crime to provide uninterrupted accounts of their experiences using open and fair questioning (Clarke and Milne 2001; Griffiths and Milne 2005; Milne and Bull 1999), research has also informed the evolution of the Cognitive Interview, which integrates psychological principles to aid witness accuracy and recall (Fisher and Geiselman 1992; Fisher et al. 1989; Geiselman et al. 1986). There is a penchant in psychology for examining investigative interviewing by
distilling interview data, cataloguing interview techniques and quantifying responses to questioning. Few studies have adopted detailed, qualitative methods of enquiry to explore how investigative interviewing is put into practice. Methodological approaches such as sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and discourse analysis, emerged in opposition to empiricist psychology and sociology and favoured the indepth, interpretative analysis of naturally occurring interactions. Discourse analysis in particular has examined how competing versions of criminal offences are negotiated and co-constructed in the police interview. Watson (1990) examined the interactional structure of US murder interrogations and noted police interviewers asserting their influence on suspect testimony. Through the use of knowledge claims, such as ‘we also know about the gun in the Morris homicide’ (Watson 1990: 266), officers bolstered facticity and ensured that simple denials were insufficient to counter accusations. Linell and Jönsson (1991) observed a clash between the ‘everyday life’ perspective of suspects and the ‘professional’ perspective of the police in Swedish interviews with individuals suspected of
economic offences. Their findings demonstrated how the professional perspective dominated interactions as officers asked closed questions, narrowly defined conditions for answering, and provided reformulations of the suspects’ responses. In a UK police interview with a suspect accused of violent assault, Auburn et al. (1999) explored the discursive resources used by an officer to manufacture a ‘preferred version’ of events. The officer in (1) indicates doubt following an account of a woman accused of seriously injuring her partner:
(1) (Extract from Auburn et al. 1999: 51)
1 IR: [suspect’s name] you are (.) 2 I believe first that you’re not actually being 3 honest with your self and with us 4 in fact I don’t believe that you’re actually 5 telling the truth 6 IE: I am telling you the truth 7 IR: Now [name a] has been stabbed twice 8 and he’s been bitten on the nose 9 IE: Yeah 10 IR: He’s in hospital now 11 IE: mmmh 12 IR: I believe that you are the person who have 13 actually inflicted those stab wounds to [name a] 14 now think carefully (.) and answer the question 15 honestly 16 IE: No I didn’t do it
Auburn et al. observed a three-part organisation of disbelief in the talk of the police officer, first indicated in lines 2-5, as the interviewer discounts the version of events provided by suspect. The officer accuses the suspect of not only being dishonest with the institutional ‘us’ but also engaging in self-deception. The officer then upgrades the accusation by replacing the indirect ‘you’re not actually being honest with your self and with us’ with an overt accusation of dishonesty, ‘I don’t believe that you’re actually telling the truth’ (lines 4-5). The officer implies that an objective truth exists into which the known facts fit and that the accused and the accuser possess this information. Following the suspect’s denial in line 6, the officer instructs the suspect to reconsider, ‘think carefully (.) and answer the question honestly’ (lines 14-15). The interviewer creates an expectation that the discrepancy between the accounts of the suspect and police officer should be resolved through an amendment of the suspect’s original account. In Dutch police interviews with individuals accused of theft, Komter (2003) charts the
progression of an officer’s distrust in a suspect’s version of events, from questioning the plausibility of the account with reference to commonsense notions of events and responses, to encouraging the suspect to admit to downgraded versions of the offence. This need for a detailed, explicit, institutionally preferred version of events has been explained by Gibbons (2003) as a ‘pursuit of precision’. Due to the influential nature of legal formulations, such as whether a killing is described as murder or manslaughter, Gibbons claims that officers adopt a formal, over-elaborate vocabulary, such as ‘I was proceeding down the highway in a south easterly direction’ rather than ‘I was walking down the road’ (Gibbons 2003: 85), to eliminate misinterpretation in the criminal justice system.
