In this section we focus on the syntactic and semantic complexity of police officers’ speaking turns in conversations because it is the second most common source of miscommunication in our dataset. It is also an area in which conversational repairs are the most difficult to achieve. For instance, if a word used by a police officer or a suspect is not understood, this could be easily remedied (e.g. by providing definitions and checking understanding of the key terms; Filipović 2021). Complex syntax, however, poses a greater challenge and has been identified as a source of processing difficulty and communication problems in previous work.Footnote 9 For example, students’ comprehension of examination instruction was significantly improved when complexity was removed from the formulation of the questions (Abedi and Lord 2001). More specifically, in police communication research, Berk-Seligson (2009) found that syntactic complexity, such as the use of embedded clauses, or multiple clauses per sentence, is typically found at the beginning of the police interrogation (in her US case studies). She argues that even a native speaker of English who had no more than a high school education would have difficulty processing these structures. We can agree entirely with this statement with the addition that in our dataset we found complexity of this kind in multiple places throughout both the UK interviews and the US interrogations.Footnote 10 Previous literature has shown that inappropriate or unproductive questions can lead to distorted responses (Milne and Bull 1999) or even false confessions (Gudjonsson 2003). Complex questions, negative questions and statement questions have all been identified as inappropriate (Milne and Bull 1999; Shawyer and Walsh 2007; Griffiths and Milne 2006; Oxburgh et al. 2010). Interestingly, statement questions are one of the most frequent types of question asked in the context of UK policing (Leahy-Harland and Bull 2016; Filipović 2019a). Leahy-Harland and Bull (2016) argue that statement questions per se were not considered problematic in their research of suspect responses and suggest that a study of statement questions merits a more detailed qualitative analysis, which is what we give below. They further point out that negative questions in their analysis were associated with an increased likelihood of suspects denying the offence. And even though negative questions were not frequent in their study, the fact that they exist may be a cause for concern that should be addressed in police training of interviewers. Filipović (2019a) found that negative questions can persist in specific interview styles of some police officers in the UK, who use them significantly more than most officers, and during all phases of the interview. In spite of them being less frequent, and not so widely spread across many interviews, negative questions are certainly worth mentioning in the context of miscommunication.
We analyse the key types of questions that lead to miscommunication under one heading of complexity because it is their syntactic and semantic complexity that is the main root of the problem, as we exemplify and explain further below. Crucially, the different complex questions perform different functions in the UK vs. the US law enforcement communication. Our goal was not to count all of the complex questions, but to identify those that created miscommunication and explain why this happens and what the consequences are. We found that problematic complex questions occur in almost a third of our UK transcripts (30%), and in the US portion they are found in one sixth (12%) of the transcripts. We start by exemplifying the different types of complex questions that we identified in our dataset (see also Filipović 2019a for further discussion). These include multiple referent introduction (example 6 and also (8a)), negative interrogatives (example 7), complex statement questions (examples (8a) and (8b)):
(6)
Police officer: You mention ringing his cousin – were he and the girl in that club with you?
Suspect: X stayed with me all night towards the end close to the incident time when we were arrested; that was the one time we parted.
Police Officer: Was his cousin and the girl in the club as well?
Suspect: Yes they were there, they entered that place.
(7)
Police officer: Did you not find that strange that he wanted his notebook?
Suspect: He’s explained that he’s fallen out with whoever he was renting from, whether that was his sister or his landlord, I didn’t understand, and then he was going to his friend’s […].
(8a)
Police officer: In the first pub there is some CCTV of X’s cousin and the girl and it also shows another girl who had her phone stolen. The victim can be seen holding her phone and she then puts it away. She then approaches the bar in the pub and is followed by X’s cousin and the girl?
Suspect: I dunno.
(8b)
Police officer: So X told me that at night you had gone into her bedroom and lay next to her in her bed. Then you put her hand on his penis and it felt wet. From what I understand X then got up from the bed, so did you, and then you gave her some biscuits and milk for breakfast.
Suspect: It was a normal thing to give her at breakfast.
All the above examples come from the UK portion of the dataset, and we also exemplify and discuss some US examples further below. Example (6) illustrates multiple referent introduction (“he”, “his cousin”) delays the processing and impedes the understanding of the content, as evidenced in the suspect’s response, which seems off-topic. The second question by the police officer, which is simpler and much clearer, results in a straightforward answer. Thus, the initial, complex question was a waste of time and in fact introduced a risk that not answering it properly could be interpreted as a resistance strategy and create negative impact on the rapport (see Filipović 2019a).
Another type of a difficult-to-process question detected in police interviews involves negative questions such as the one in example (7). Such questions are harder to process than the regular interrogatives and they carry an inherent bias — a presumption that something was done that should not have been done, or vice versa. Additionally, both yes and no answers can be given as a confirmation or a denial, as in “yes, I did not think it strange” vs. “yes, exactly, I did think that strange” or “no, I did not think it strange” vs. “no, I actually did think it strange”. As we can see, this complexity of possibilities is mind-boggling at the best of times, and we often cannot be sure if we have answered a negative question in the way we intended even under normal circumstances, when chatting with friends, let alone when under pressure in police questioning. The suspect in (7) starts explaining why he thinks that the back door was used for the entry, but in effect, it sounds like he was avoiding a straightforward answer, which need not have been the case. It is the police officer in this case that is using a confrontational, presumptive and accusatory communication style by formulating this (and multiple other) questions with a negative interrogative.
Examples (8a) and (8b) illustrate another kind of problematic atypical phrasing, which is the use of complex statements as questions, very common in police discourse and more pronounced in the UK context where these examples come from. As Oxburgh et al. (2015) point out, it is important to focus on the function of a question rather than just the form in order to determine what the question wants to achieve. Statements often function as confirmation-seeking questions, but if they consist of multiple clauses or sentences, and multiple logical or temporal operators (such as “if” or “when”), problems arise in language processing. Not all statement questions are problematic. Simple statements questions, as in e.g., “She unbuttoned her pants?”, are very frequent in UK police interviews and US police interrogations, but they do not cause miscommunication because they are simple. The complex statement questions, on the other hand, are very problematic because they make it difficult for the suspect to process them and respond to them, and they can elicit responses that can easily be interpreted as lack of cooperation. For example, in (8a) the suspect just answered “I dunno”, while the expected response would be to either confirm or deny the description of this event, or provide more detail, if wanting to be cooperative. Importantly, as observed before (Filipović 2019a), statement questions can significantly delay the elicitation of evidence because their exact function or the format of an expected response is not clear to the interviewees. Furthermore, what we also see in (8a) is multiple vague and unclear references to specific objects or events (using “it” or “that” without specifying what those refer to precisely) and such questions fail to perform the main function of elicit more information or confirmation. In (8b) we also see a very complex question where the serious accusations in the beginning of the question are not addressed and only the last portion, and the most irrelevant one in this context, is picked up in the suspect’s answer. The reason for this could be that the suspect is avoiding the serious accusations but still wants to look cooperative and appear to be answering the questions. The fact that he decides to talk about the appropriateness of cereals for breakfast instead of accusations of molestation of a child may even seem like a form of mockery. However, we also have to bear in mind that loaded questions such as this may often end up in triggering a response related only to the last portion of the question due to the so-called recency effect. This phenomenon captures the feature of human memory to recall the most recent items on list the best (see Murdock 1962; Bjork and Whitten 1974). Whether this specific case of miscommunication is genuine or manipulated on the part of the suspect, we cannot say (unlike in some other cases where it is obviously the latter; see below). What we can say is that the response in (8b) is certainly odd and apparently uncooperative, and it delays and impedes the elicitation of evidence.
What is important to highlight here is that in most cases these complex statements that are supposed to function as questions do not appear to be used to threaten or provoke in the UK context (in contrast to the US context, see further below); rather, the reason why they are used is to probe for confirmation or, denial, or for more detail, which can be used as evidence. It is only on some rare occasions (in two transcripts) that UK police officers slip into the adversarial/accusatory mode characteristic of the US police interrogations and not endorsed in the UK investigative interviewing model. An example from our UK data illustrating this is given in (9):
(9)
Q: Is that true? I have given you the opportunity – if it is not, when we view it numerous times in the past here people tell me things like that and we go through it all and it doesn’t ever appear like they tell us.
A: I didn’t do nothing wrong.
It is interesting that complexity was less of a problem for communication in the US context, though it is not unexpected if we take into account the different type of discourse that the US interrogation is compared to the UK police interview. We found that the syntactically complex structures such as those in examples (6) and (7) are much rarer and only occur occasionally. This is not very surprising: police questions in the US context are short, succinct and fired in quick succession, as exemplified in the example (10):
(10)
Police officer: How many, how many times did you touch her breasts?
Interpreter: He said that he was joking around, playing is probably the way I touched her.
Police officer: She says seven times. Is that accurate?
Interpreter: He said, yeah, probably, yeah, but [Inaudible/overlapping voices] I didn’t have bad intention.Footnote 11
Nevertheless, in 12% of the US transcripts (6 out of 50 files) we still have instances of the complexity of the kind exemplified in (8a) and (8b). In contrast to the UK data, the function of these complex questions is completely different. It is aimed solely at persuading the suspect to confess. A police officer may speak at length about the different possible outcomes, using multiple conditional sentences, multiple clauses within sentences, combined with accusatory or threatening statements and imperative sentences requiring explicit confirmation, as in the examples (11) and (12), originally conducted in Spanish only (here cited in the English translation from the transcript). In some cases, the police officer is doing most of the talking (in one case over 90% percent of the time(!)). The suspect in example (12) barely manages an occasional short turn or an expression of apparent concurrence (“um-hum”) throughout the interrogation.
(11)
Police officer: Having each one of these rights that I’ve, uh, just explained to you, do you want to talk to me?
Suspect: [Inaudible].
Police officer: Well, it’s a decision, uh, if you want to talk to me that’s fine, if you don’t want to talk to me that’s fine too, it is your right, but I have to, the law says that I have to read you your rights that you have because a lot of ti … uh, times, people who are not from the United States come and they don’t understand the rights and that is part of, uh, our job, that you, the, the people who are here with us understand the law, it’s, uh, the part that, it’s a thing that I have to do and here is … my … letter … … … Have you had problems with the girl?
Suspect: No.
(12)
Police officer: … we’re looking at the person that murdered her. And, and by telling me that …… you know nothing about it …… it takes it away …… from maybe it’s an accident thing … … a much more serious type of murder …… and that’s where we’re going.
Suspect: Um-hum.
The suspect in example (11) is obviously hesitating to confirm that he would talk to the police—this is reflecting in muffled inaudible speech. The third turn is crucial here (Elder and Haugh 2018; Elder 2019): we see the police officer not wanting to lose the opportunity to question the suspect, and he fires a barrage of words in order to persuade him to continue the dialogue while not eliciting the information about the suspect’s understanding of the caution. We can assume that the Miranda Rights were not fully understood by the suspect and this failure by the police officer to communicate them properly, and the consequent miscommunication, seems to be on purpose (see Ainsworth 2008, 2010). In the example (12) the suspect’s only response is “um-hum” for almost the whole duration of a lengthy interview, during which the officer was implying that there could have been some extenuating circumstances that could mitigate the severity of the alleged crime.Footnote 12 It is safe to assume that the suspects in examples (11) and (12) could not have processed everything said by their respective interogators or the implications of the officers’ statements. The miscommunication in example (12) also stems from the possibility that the officer is taking the concurrence as acceptance of guilt and his explanation for it, while the suspect is perhaps just being generally agreeable and simply uttering “um-hum” as a back-channeling response. Even the legal representative of the suspect who went through the transcript later (Fig. 3) was not sure what exactly was being implied. In fact, the legal representative marked a point (in hand-writing) in the transcript (Fig. 3) where a possible illegal promise of leniency ("if you want to tell me what happened, the thing will end quickly") appears to have been made). This case also illustrates a previously identified phenomenon in police interrogations known as confessing through concurring by both Spanish speaking suspects in the US (Berk-Seligson 2009; Filipović 2021) and Aboriginal suspects in the Australian context (Eades 1994, 2008). The concurring is usually motivated by the suspect’s cultural norms of communication or by the external institutional pressure and power inequality. Ross and Mirowsky (1984) explain that acquiescence among US Hispanics functions as a self-preservation strategy of individuals who are relatively powerless in society. It is a deferential, submissive and non-resistant response, all in order to present a ‘good face’ and merit acceptance. The suspect in this case concurs from the beginning to the end of the interrogation.