Establishing the structure of police evidentiary interviews with suspects

Abstract

This paper provides a description of the structure of police interviews|which aligns the institutionally defined (functional) parts of the interview with a linguistic description meaningful for the analysis of talk in interaction. The analysis is based on data drawn from recordings of police interviews with suspects from rural Australia. It is found that, in particular, the shift from the formal introductory part of the interview to the information seeking part of the interview is marked by participants attempting to realign the participant roles (Goffman 1974) to a participation framework which will best facilitate the confessional narrative of the suspect. However this realignment is itself problematized by some police participants as, through their negotiation of the shift, they must routinely maintain their role as ‘interrogator’.