A Question of Training: Issues of language and power in formal police investigative interviews

In the nineties, the PEACE Enhanced Cognitive interviewing model was developed by and for police in England and Wales. Its aim was to offer a more effective and ethical alternative to persuasive interviewing.This study analyses a number of police training interviews conducted by the Metropolitan Police at the Hendon Police Academy in the United Kingdom. Formal police interviews, together with other types of institutional interviews, are characterised by a dyadic, asymmetrical turn-taking system whose main feature is that of pre-allocation: questions are put forward by the investigating officer(s), answers are provided by the layperson. The research exploits the methodological framework offered by Conversation Analysis in order to analyse the key features of these prototypical investigative interviews.After a brief overview of the procedural models which govern interviewing techniques, the paper investigates suspect-initiated questions among which three distinct groups are identified: requests for clarification, polemic enquiries and information-seeking questions.A second section is devoted to the interviewing officer’s third turn receipt markers, such as neutral “ok” and formulations with lexical variation.A further section of the study analyses the elicitation/information-seeking questions put forward by the interviewing officers and posits that such officers are not always able to adhere to the TEDS (tell, explain, describe, show) framework, which encourages open, non-threatening questions, but regularly adopt more traditional “wh” questions, thus narrowing the suspect’s scope for response.Finally, it illustrates that conversationalisation techniques are recurrently employed throughout the interviews, though such ‘democratized’ discourse would invariably appear to serve goal-oriented institutional aims.