This book presents a critical analysis of police interviewing in Australia. The author investigates the role of the police in the police–suspect interview in relation to both the negotiation of power relations between participants and the fulfillment of institutional requirements. Combining the analytical tools provided by interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis (CA), Heydon investigates recordings of police questioning of adult suspects. These findings are compared to findings of a previous study (Heydon 1997), in which Heydon investigated recordings of the training of police for interviewing children. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to interpret the results of the descriptive analysis.
The book contains seven chapters and an appendix that presents the features of the police–suspect interviews. Chapters 1 and 2 are an introduction to the theoretical and methodological background of the study. The author explains her use of ordinary, undisputed police questioning of suspects (rather than data with conflict or disputes) and justifies her choice by claiming that this type of data might illuminate ordinary police practice. Taking a CA approach to the data, at least in the initial chapters, she shows how the institutionality of the interaction is constructed through the participants' orientations.
Chapter 3 presents the first part of the analysis, which proposes a descriptive framework for the interview structure. The three main parts of the police interview, according to the author, are Opening, Information Gathering, and Closing. The analysis of the interviews reveals that the Opening and Closing sections are quite distinct from the Information Gathering section in regard to the participation framework (Goffman 1974, 1981). In the Opening and Closing sections, the police officers perform the role of “animators” (responsible for the production of the utterances), whereas the roles of “author” (responsible for the writing of the words spoken and their meanings) and “principal” (responsible for the consequences of the utterances) continue to belong to the police force. In other words, in the Opening and Closing sections the police officers limit themselves to quite formulaic utterances, which elicit responses from the suspects that are constrained and non-voluntary. The analysis shows the police officers' unwillingness to deviate from formal language even when they are explicitly asked by the suspects to explain something. As the author herself states, “This is consistent with the key functional requirements of the Opening and Closing, which are identified as maintaining adherence to the police regulatory requirements in order to ensure the validity of any confession elicited from the suspect in the remainder of the interview” (p. 91).
In contrast, the analysis of the middle part of the interview, the Information Gathering section, reveals that the participants orient themselves to one preferred participation framework, labeled by Heydon as S3R framework. Within such a framework, participants are assigned all the three roles (animator, author, and principal). Such orientation seems to be in agreement with one of the main institutional goals of the police interview, which is to guarantee a voluntary confession from the suspect. However, suspects are shown to align with this framework only in relation to the utterances that support their versions of the events, while the police officers are shown to attempt “to invoke S3R for all utterances concerning the events in question” (p. 91).
In chapter 4, Heydon takes a CA approach to the turn-by-turn construction of each section of the police–suspect encounter. The analysis shows that both police officers and suspects use the strategy of providing evidence to support their (normally competing) versions of the events. The analysis also demonstrates how police officers make use of formulations (Heritage & Watson 1979, Fairclough 1989) as a discursive strategy to exclude contextual information provided by the suspects and to bring in alternative versions that emphasize the violent and most negative aspects of the narrative earlier produced by the suspects.
Heydon identifies a conflict in the distribution of resources to floor access and topic initiation among the participants. According to the author, the turn-taking structure, which places the police officer as the elicitor of the information within the Information Gathering section, is crucial in establishing a “deference structure.” The floor is always returned to the officers at the end of a question-answer adjacency pair, and any attempts by the suspects to take control over question initiation would not be accepted by the police institution. Heydon comments on how questionable such asymmetrical distribution of resources (to topic initiation and floor access) might be for the success of the event, whose main goal is actually to obtain the voluntary disclosure of important information.
Topic management is another way to secure the authority of the police officers over the suspects. The author shows that topic shift is primarily initiated by police officers in the interviews. Whereas suspects initiate topic shifts using a “stepwise transition,” a “primary interviewing officer may initiate new topics disjunctively and even interruptively” (p. 131). As Heydon claims, “Whereas the interviewee is only able to introduce new topics in ways which do not obligate the interviewer to take up a respondent role, the interviewer can introduce a new topic within any first pair part” (p. 146).
Chapter 5 brings in the findings of a previous study by Heydon (1997), which involves a different type of data: training interviews by police officers with child witnesses. The results of this study are used to problematize institutional discourse as necessarily asymmetrical. The findings from Heydon's 1997 study contrast markedly with the findings of the analysis of the police–suspect interviews, showing that the discursive strategies used by the police officers when interviewing suspects are not the only ones available to them, and that not all interviewing events with police officers will necessarily involve asymmetrical distribution of status and power. Even though police–child interviews hold some features in common with the police–suspect interviews, such as formal and asymmetrical rituals, they are also quite different from the latter. Police–child interviews also present features of a less formal character, such as informal naming rituals and receipt markers. In those interviews, police officers are shown to present a caring attitude and a genuine concern about the comfort of a child being interviewed. Thus, the findings in chapter 5 reveal that it is possible for the police to reconcile the institutional goals of an information-seeking interview with the concerns of the interviewee.
In chapter 6, Heydon integrates the results of the analyses of the two different types of data (police–suspect interviews and police–child interviews) in order to discuss one of her main points in the book: the police's myths or underlying beliefs about discursive practices when interviewing suspects. These are (i) the myth of comprehension, (ii) the myth of threatened authority, and (iii) the myth of persuasion. In relation to the myth of comprehension, the analysis shows that the concerns about the complexity of legal jargon in the interviews might result in police officers' overlooking the confusion that more ordinary language can also cause. The concerns seem to be supported by the institutional requirements from the officers to check the suspects' understanding of the legal jargon but not of other aspects of the interview.
The analysis of the myth of threatened authority shows that some of the interviewing officers seemed to hold mistaken beliefs about the vulnerability of their authoritative voice. Interestingly, the most successful interview outcomes happened when the police officer would orient himself or herself more toward the role of “information recipient” rather than “questioner.” Still, the most common role taken by the officers recorded was of “questioner.” The analysis of the third myth shows that the police's belief in their persuasive power is also mistaken. In the negotiation of police officers' and suspects' competing versions of events, no discursive practice was identified in the analysis as successful in altering that alignment. As the author claims, “the suspect will never change their story” (p. 191).
Chapter 7 looks at mythology as a social activity. Heydon revisits the main findings of the police discursive practices and presents a critical view of them. She also discusses the relationship between police power and institutionality and the consequences of the police institutional discourse on the interview process. The chapter ends with directions for future research and suggestions for police interview practice.
This is certainly a rich and thoughtful book, and an important contribution for many areas of investigation. Heydon succeeds in presenting a methodologically rigorous and thought-provoking account of talk and power in institutional discourse, thus advancing our understanding of the complexities involved in investigating institutional contexts. The data used for the analyses are based on naturally occurring interactions, which ensures reliability for the discussion.
Even though, as the Heydon herself seems to be aware, the book could potentially receive criticism for the combination of interactional sociolinguistics and CA with critical work – especially from CA practitioners – it is exactly the critical interpretation of the descriptive analyses that seems to bring up the potential for the book to find practical relevance among police officers. Interesting in particular is the critical interpretation of the power of formulations by police officers about the events reported by suspects.
Another positive aspect is the comparison drawn between the findings from the police–suspect interviews and the police–child interviews. The contrast provided by the side-by-side comparison of the two sets of data is especially illuminating as well as powerfully convincing for the critical claims the author wants to make about the police myths in the last chapters in the book.
A potentially negative aspect of Heydon's study is not having used the original, classic piece of work by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sachs 1977 for the analysis of repair in her data (pp. 97–98). Instead, she relies solely on Levinson's (1983) explanations of the phenomenon, which, even though sound, do not encompass all issues involved in repair work. Some mistakes were also spotted in the references to line numberings in the transcripts, as on p. 98.
On the whole, the book is well conceived and written in an accessible manner. The fine concluding sections at the end of each chapter are extremely helpful in keeping the reader focused. Students as well as more experienced researchers interested in interactional sociolinguistics, CA, forensic linguistics, CDA, and talk-in-interaction in general might find this book most valuable.
