Helping the Police with Their Enquiries: Enhancing the Investigative Interview with Linguistic Research

Abstract

Since the UK Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced tape recorders to police interview rooms in 1984, the insights gained from audio- (and, more recently, video-) recorded police interview data have enabled forensic psychologists to analyse the cognitive and behavioural processes of interview participants, leading to sweeping changes in the way that interviewing is taught and practised by British police officers. However, less attention has been paid to the language of police interviewing and police interviewing methods practised in other parts of the world, such as the Reid Technique, which is ubiquitous in North America. This paper seeks to address both these deficiencies by introducing a linguistic perspective to the analysis of data drawn from an Australian corpus of recorded police interviews. This analysis examined the ‘roles' that speakers take up when producing talk as a way of showing how the speaker aligns to the content of the talk. It finds that voluntary confessions by suspects differ in role alignments from police assertions. When evaluating the quality of evidential information obtained in an interview, it is critical to the robustness of the case that the brief is prepared on the basis of volunteered information and not police suggestions. Linguistic theory about role alignments provides a simple tool for distinguishing between talk that is initiated by the suspect and represents new intelligence in the interview, and information that is introduced by the police.