Recognising understandability: How police officers respond to drunk persons’ undecipherable turns

Abstract

Police officers (POs) dealing with a drunk person (DP) face a challenge: they need to engage with the DP, whose ability to participate in the production of orderly talk-in-interaction cannot be taken for granted. Using conversation analysis to analyse data from 32 encounters video-recorded for a TV documentary, this article identifies five practices utilised by Finnish POs when responding to DPs’ undecipherable turns. These practices range from ignoring the DP's turns-in-talk altogether, to diverse repair mechanisms that reveal various orientations to the DP's status as a problematic speaker. Because POs typically assume that the DP's impairment is self-inflicted, the moral accountability for the interactional deficit also differs from cases where speakers suffer from a seizure, for example. The article contributes to an understudied field of research in the sequential organisation of ‘drunk talk’ by looking at the context of policing where the interactional asymmetry is due to both intoxication and authority.