Interrogation versus Interviewing in Fictional Police Procedurals

The aim of this investigation is to distinguish between the linguistic and semiotic features which pertain to and characterize fictional police 'interviews', as opposed to those related to the activity of 'interrogation'. The corpus is made up of a number of episodes from the British police series 'The Bill' and its Italian format equivalent 'La Squadra'. In the English procedural, the recourse to true-to-life features such as the strict adherence to pre-allocated discursive roles in the question/answer adjacency pairs, the formulaic utterances employed in the 'opening' and 'closing' phases of the tri-partite interview, the distribution of participant roles to favour voluntary confession, together with the information-eliciting question typology and the non-coercive participation frameworks repeatedly employed in the information-seeking phase of the interview, qualify such speech exchanges as procedurally correct 'investigative interviews'. Conversely, in the Italian format equivalent 'La Squadra', the lack of any form of legislative framework, the asymmetrical coercive interrogation tactics, and the absence of a judicial 'overhearing audience' to guarantee police neutrality, all serve to grant these discursive encounters an impact based more on dramatic effect than on the reflection of procedural reality. The contrast between British 'procedurality' and Italian 'individuality', seen as dominant traits pertaining to the two cultures, opens up interesting paths for further research.