A Question of Training: Issues of Language and Power in Formal Police Investigative Interviews

This chapter focuses on a number of interviews conducted within the Enhanced Cognitive interview framework. Analysis is carried out upon a number of authentic 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. An investigative interview can be classified as an "elicitation interview" or an "information interview" (Shuy 1997: 178), and the questions asked can be placed in two broad categories: information-seeking and confirmation-seeking. As for the answers provided by the layperson in the course of the interview, they can also deploy a number of characteristic features: an answer may qualify as a response rather than an answer proper, overt and covert evasion strategies may be adopted in order not to provide the required information and the speaker's epistemic stance may be purposefully called into play to rival that of the investigating officer. Drawing upon the corpus of written transcripts of formal police training interviews and exploiting the methodological framework offered by Conversation Analysis, the key features of these prototypical investigative interviews are identified and analysed.