Tools for the Analysis of Police Interviews

Abstract

The approach to the analysis described in this chapter was specifically designed as a multi-layered or ‘staged’ response to the aims of this book. Thus, in subsequent chapters, we will be using the analytic tools described here in order to:

• provide a descriptive framework of police-suspect interviews based on linguistic devices and interactional features used in recordings of thirteen police interviews with suspects;

• analyse this description of the interviews and reveal the conversational strategies used by participants as they negotiate the various functional requirements of the interviews; and

• expose the process through which underlying beliefs of the police participants routinely affect the construction of the police interview both as an interaction in time and space and as a socially and culturally situated activity.

The identification of an interview framework based on linguistic devices and interactional features provides a platform for the subsequent microanalysis of participants’ discursive practices. The resulting description of the turn-by-turn construction of the interview will then contribute to the investigation of myths in a police institutional setting and the role of police institutional discourse in the construction of a mythology.