Interpreter-mediated Police Interviews

A Discourse-Pragmatic Approach

I. Nakane

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230355149
• eBook ISBN: 9781137443199
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistica

This book shows how participation of interpreters as mediators changes the dynamics of police interviews, particularly with regard to power struggles and competing versions of events. The analysis of interaction offers insights into language in the legal process.

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Police Interviews and Interpreter Mediation

To locate this book in the relevant fields of research, this chapter gives an overview of research into police interview discourse and interpreter-mediated legal discourse. It introduces the institutional frameworks which shape police interviews, as well as sociolinguistic perspectives on police interview discourse as a genre. The chapter then discusses research into interpreter mediation as interaction and interpreted discourse in the legal context.

1.1 The police interview as a legal process

1.1.1 Purposes of police interviews

One of the purposes of police interviews is to gather relevant facts for an investigation, and another is to confirm what investigators allege to have happened in the crime (Baldwin, 1993; Gibbons, 2003; Heydon, 2005; Hill, 2003). Interviews have been widely seen as problematic, because police interviewers commonly assume the guilt of their suspects during the questioning; they may focus more on confirming guilt or eliciting a confession than on finding out what actually happened (Baldwin, 1993; Heydon, 2005; Hill, 2003; Leo & Drizin, 2010; Shuy, 1998). In recent years, however, overtly coercive questioning tactics have come to be regarded as unacceptable, and legislative changes such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in England and Wales in 1984 have led to the introduction in many parts of the world of official guidelines for investigative interviewing to ensure appropriate procedures and the admissibility of police interviews as evidence (Heydon, 2012; Rock, 2007).

One of the major consequences of this reform in the criminal justice system has been the introduction in 1993 of the PEACE model (see Section 1.2.1 below) of interviewing procedures into the training of officers in police forces in England and Wales to improve police interview practices and to avoid later exclusion of evidence due to inappropriate questioning. Central to this model is the cognitive interview technique developed by Gieselman et al. (1984). It involves memory-enhancing strategies and invitation to free narrative (Milne & Bull, 1999). The PEACE model has been adopted by police forces outside England and Wales (cf. Rock, 2007), but the uptake has been relatively recent and limited in Australia (Heydon, 2012). One study claims that the cognitive interview was introduced to the Victoria state police force in Australia as early as in 2000, but finds that the actual application of the approach has not been comprehensive (Buckley, 2009).

Nevertheless, it is important to note that information obtained voluntarily from the interviewee in free narrative style statements is considered the most reliable evidence in many jurisdictions (for example, Heydon, 2005; Shuy, 1998), including Australia. Thus, analysis of police interview discourse needs to take into account that the police interviewer’s questioning orientation should be guided by this preference for voluntarily-given free narrative statements. However, if the police interviewer is under pressure to obtain a confession, especially if other evidence pointing to the suspect’s guilt does not exist, there is a tension between the need to construct the police-preferred version of events and the legal preference for voluntarily offered stories (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007). The interpreter’s understanding of these institutional frameworks affecting the interview could make a difference in the quality of interpreting and thus in the outcome of the investigation.

The legal requirements and principles of police interviews affect the ways in which police questioning is conducted (Carter, 2011; Haworth, 2006; Heydon, 2005; Newbury & Johnson, 2006). However, as lay persons, suspects may find some aspects of questioning procedures to be remote from ordinary conversation and highly puzzling, unless they are familiar with the discourse conventions and institutional requirements of police interviews (see Rock, 2007 regarding communication of rights). This puzzlement may increase if the suspect comes from a minority cultural and/or linguistic background.

1.1.2 Police interviews as evidence

Police interviews are communicative processes, but they are also products because they form evidence which is used and scrutinised in the trial (Haworth, 2006, 2010). This duality needs to be taken into account in analysing police interviews. In Australia and jurisdictions such as England and Wales, police interviews are video recorded and can be presented in court, as is, as evidence. This means that statements can be confirmed in court in terms of what was said and how the statement was made. However, and importantly, the existence of a future audience and the recording of the interview process itself can affect the way in which police interviews are conducted and questioning tactics are used (Haworth, 2010; Johnson, 2006; Stokoe & Edwards, 2008). Haworth (2010) demonstrates that, unlike police interviewers who are used to pitching their discourse with a view towards future trials, suspects are often unaware of the evidential role of police interviews and could even make incriminating statements. The other consequence of the duality of police interviewing is the police interviewer’s need to ensure a recording whose content and quality will be admissible in court. For example, police officers may interrupt the suspect’s narrative account, to clarify for the record deictic references made by the suspect or non-verbal aspects of the communication (Stokoe, 2009).

The evidential purpose of police interviewing may affect the process of interpreter-mediated interviews in several ways. One issue is the interpreter’s understanding and handling of the legal framing and its linguistic realisation; that is, their understanding of the reasons why questions are constructed and sequenced in certain ways. The interpreter’s alignment or lack of it with the police interviewer’s institutional orientation, whether intentional or unintentional, may affect the course of investigative interviews and consequently the outcome of the case. Another issue is that the ‘interpreter’s own speaking space’ (Dimitrova, 1997, p. 149) is sometimes constrained, or interfered with, by the police interviewer’s need to ensure admissibility of the recorded interview as evidence.

1.2 The police interview as a discourse process

1.2.1 Structure of police interviews

The police interview is a legal genre (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007; Gibbons, 2003; Johnson, 2006), and is ‘a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity’ (Martin, 1984, p. 25). In Australia, there appears to be a focus on standardised legislative elements and a common practice of inviting the interviewee to ‘tell their story’ before probing (Heydon, 2012). Ord et al. (2011, p. 101), writing for an Australian readership, present a model of interviewing with the following five stages: (1) legal and procedural matters; (2) suspect’s account; (3) interviewer’s objectives; (4) challenges; (5) interview closure. They also provide guidance on ‘Preparation’ and ‘Evaluation’ to investigators, which together with the above five stages aligns the Australian model with the PEACE model. The PEACE model, a top-down approach, includes the stages of Planning and preparation (P) and Evaluation (the last E), which take place outside the interviewing activity itself. The three stages within the interview are Engage and explain (E), Account (A) and Closure (C) (Milne & Bull, 1999, p. 159).

Heydon (2005) identified the following stages of interviewing based on her empirical analysis of police interviews in Australia: Opening, Information gathering, and Closing (p. 73). Heydon also describes the overall goal of each of those stages, with ‘[a]dhere to legislative requirements’ for the Opening and Closing, and ‘[p]roduce voluntary confession’ for the Information gathering stage. This goal of the Information gathering stage is at odds with the recommended approach described in Ord et al. (2011):

If a suspect is being interviewed, for example, the aim may be to establish whether or not the suspect was involved in the incident or offence, not to prove his or her involvement in that incident or offence. (p. 9, italics in original)

Here we see again the tension between ‘truth or proof’ (Baldwin, 1993) as the aim of police interviewing. This issue is nevertheless partly dealt with through the recommended inclusion of an invitation to the suspect to give their own account of the case in a free narrative style, before specific questions are asked (Gibbons, 2003; Heydon, 2005; Ord et al., 2011). A typical example is ‘Tell me what happened on ….’ It should also be noted that police officers commonly ask the suspect, in the ‘Closing’ stage of interviewing, whether the suspect has been coerced into making certain statements (Gibbons, 2003), which is related to a legal requirement for admissibility of the interview as evidence.

The main point concerning the overall structure of police interviews is that there are opening and closing phases before and after the questioning respectively, where communication addressing legal requirements and orientation take place. The questioning itself usually begins with an invitation for a narrative account, followed by specific questioning and probing. In interpreter-mediated police interviews, an awareness of the overall genre structure and the purposes of each of the stages is required of the interpreter since the underlying institutional principles and assumptions are not always explicitly communicated to the suspect.

1.2.2 Opening and closing phases of police interviews

The opening and closing sections of police interviews have been identified as distinctively oriented to ‘adhering to legislative requirements’ (Heydon, 2005, p. 73) and as having a participation framework in which the interviewing officers speak on behalf of the police institution (Heydon, 2005). A standardised set of utterances are used to record the time and date of the interview, the persons present, and to communicate the rights of the interviewee (Gibbons, 2003; Heydon, 2005; Rock, 2007). Gibbons (2003) represents Heydon’s ‘Opening’ and ‘Closing’ stages of police interviews as ‘Primary reality framing’ and the Information gathering stage as ‘Secondary reality framing’. ‘Primary reality’ refers to the here and now of the legal process (police interviewing procedure) while ‘secondary reality’ points to the crime, its circumstances and events associated with the crime.

With its semantics and grammar explicitly associated with the legal register, the language used in the opening and closing phases of police interviews is generally more formal than that of the Information gathering or questioning phase (cf. Cotterill, 2000; Gibbons, 2003; Rock, 2007). This is not surprising given that these phases address matters in relation to the primary reality of police interviews as a legal process. Communication difficulties associated with the communication of rights during the Opening phase have been discussed as a serious issue in the legal process (Cotterill, 2000; Gibbons, 2003; Rock, 2007; Shuy, 1997). Nakane (2007) and Russell (2000) discuss how these difficulties might be compounded in interpreter-mediated police interviews.

1.2.3 Questioning and competing versions of events

The information gathering phase, or the ‘body’ of the interviewing discourse, can be described as questioning proper. The goals of questioning a suspect are, as mentioned earlier, twofold: to elicit information relevant to the investigation of the crime and to establish whether he or she has committed a crime. The orientation of the police, as mentioned above, often tends towards achieving confirmation of guilt (Auburn et al., 1995; Heydon, 2005; Leo & Drizin, 2010; Shuy, 1998).

However, the interviewer’s goal and the suspect’s interests are in conflict. Suspects often attempt either to deny involvement in the crime or to construct a story with potentially mitigating factors (Haworth, 2006; Linell & Jönsson, 1991; Newbury & Johnson, 2006). This clash of different versions of events is a pivotal aspect of the adversarial justice system, and a significant aspect of police interviews as a legal genre.

As Bennett and Feldman (1981) argue in their seminal work on courtroom discourse, reality is constructed and redefined through the exchanges between the parties concerned. Courtroom discourse in adversarial justice systems has often been discussed in terms of how this reality is constructed through interaction between witnesses and lawyers (for example, Heffer, 2005; Jackson, 1991), and how competing stories are presented and challenged in the courtroom through discursive strategies (for example, Gibbons, 2003; Maley & Fahey, 1991). This competition between different versions of events runs through the litigation process, from police interviews to courtroom proceedings. The credibility of the story and how the story is presented are crucial factors in determining guilt (Gibbons, 2003; Jackson, 1991; Jaquemet, 1996). This book adopts this view of competing storytelling, or the construction of versions of events, as the pivotal aspect of police interviews as a legal genre. The main concern of this book is therefore to explore the dynamics of tripartite interaction involving an interviewer, an interviewee and an interpreter, and the impact on the tensions between forces pulling the story in opposing directions.

Coulthard and Johnson (2007) argue that it is important to recognise the hybrid and dynamic nature of the police interview which is characterised by a combination of ‘lay, police and legislative language’ (Johnson, 2006, p. 669). In this view, the ‘primary reality’ is interwoven with the ‘secondary reality’ in the questioning, with the interviewer bearing in mind the role of the recorded interview as evidence, and both the interviewer and the interviewee evaluating their storytelling. This dynamic hybridity is partly a consequence of police interviewers’ professional training and their goal to construct legally acceptable versions of events to build their case. In doing this, however, one aspect of legal requirement is, as mentioned earlier, to obtain evidence through the interviewee’s voluntarily provided narrative. This may lead to officers using discourse strategies to invoke a participation framework aimed at eliciting such narratives (Heydon, 2005).

The institutional orientations create a gap in institutional knowledge and repertoires between police interviewers and suspects. As we will see, an important question in relation to this is how interpreter mediation might bridge, close or widen this gap.

1.2.4 Interaction, information and power in police interviews

In her analysis of storytelling in a trial context, Snedaker refers to three key elements: form, content and style. Form refers to ‘the connective structure that gives a pattern and shape to the discourse’ (1991, p. 135), and content to the ideas presented in the story. The third element, style, is about how the story is told, and relates to power and interpersonal relations in interaction. These elements resonate with the functions of language identified by Halliday (1978, 1989): textual, ideational and interpersonal, respectively. Following Snedaker’s and Halliday’s views of language in the social context, this book examines interpreter-mediated police interviews in relation to these three key elements of discourse, aiming to describe the interaction dynamics of the tripartite interaction (form, or textual), how the dynamics of such interaction shapes police interview discourse as evidence (content, or ideational), and how the layer of interpreter mediation affects the power relations of the participants in the institutional discourse (style, or interpersonal).

1.2.4.1 Form – the textual aspect of interaction

Police questioning is more private than courtroom questioning as far as the immediate context of the discursive event is concerned. There are more instances of co-construction of discourse and the communication is generally more spontaneous than courtroom discourse. The spontaneity of interaction in police interview discourse may pose challenges for the interpreter.

One of the most widely discussed features of police interview discourse is the pre-allocation of turn-types. As the institutional aim of police interviewing of a suspect is to gather information relevant to the case and ascertain whether the suspect has committed a crime, the police interviewer predominantly takes the role of a questioner and the suspect that of an answerer (Fairclough, 1989; Heydon, 2005; Holt & Johnson, 2010). Therefore police interviews typically consist of a large number of Question–Answer ‘adjacency pairs’ (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 716). The fact that a professional asks questions and initiates the first pair parts (FFPs) of adjacency pairs means that the topic control is also principally with the police interviewer (Heydon, 2005; Holt & Johnson, 2010).

The second pair part (SPP) may be absent or may not always be an answer; for example, if the suspect remains silent or vocally refuses to answer (cf. Coulthard & Johnson, 2007; Fairclough, 1995; Forrester & Ramsden, 2001; Haworth, 2006). Newbury and Johnson (2006), for example, demonstrate the way in which a suspect resisted his interviewer’s attempt to elicit relevant information from him by using strategies of contest, correction, avoidance and refusal. A clarification sequence such as repair initiation and repair may be inserted after a question. Heydon (2005) finds that the only interactional context in which suspects may initiate a sequence is when they initiate a repair. The relevance ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• Introduction: Tripartite Police Interview Interaction
• 1 Police Interviews and Interpreter Mediation
• 2 Setting the Scene: The Police Interviews and the Interpreting
• 3 Mediated Questioning and Balance of Power
• 4 Mediated Responses and Balance of Power
• 5 Miscommunication and Repair
• 6 Managing Silence
• 7 Mediated Reality Construction: Conclusions
• References
• Index