Police-suspect Interviews Research Articles

Incorporating automatic speech recognition methods into the transcription of police-suspect interviews: factors affecting automatic performance

IntroductionIn England and Wales, transcripts of police-suspect interviews are often admitted as evidence in courts of law. Orthographic transcription is a time-consuming process and is usually carried out by untrained transcribers, resulting in records that contain summaries of large sections of the interview and paraphrased speech. The omission or inaccurate representation of important speech content could have serious consequences in a court of law. It is therefore clear that investigation into better solutions for police-interview transcription is required. This paper explores the possibility of incorporating automatic speech recognition (ASR) methods into the transcription process, with the goal of producing verbatim transcripts without sacrificing police time and money. We consider the potential viability of automatic transcripts as a “first” draft that would be manually corrected by police transcribers. The study additionally investigates the effects of audio quality, regional accent, and the ASR system used, as well as the types and magnitude of errors produced and their implications in the context of police-suspect interview transcripts.MethodsSpeech data was extracted from two forensically-relevant corpora, with speakers of two accents of British English: Standard Southern British English and West Yorkshire English (a non-standard regional variety). Both a high quality and degraded version of each file was transcribed using three commercially available ASR systems: Amazon, Google, and Rev.ResultsSystem performance varied depending on the ASR system and the audio quality, and while regional accent was not found to significantly predict word error rate, the distribution of errors varied substantially across the accents, with more potentially damaging errors produced for speakers of West Yorkshire English.DiscussionThe low word error rates and easily identifiable errors produced by Amazon suggest that the incorporation of ASR into the transcription of police-suspect interviews could be viable, though more work is required to investigate the effects of other contextual factors, such as multiple speakers and different types of background noise.

경찰통역 담화에서 의문문 유형과 기능 : 제도대화의 특징을 중심으로

This study intends to examine the types and functions of interrogative sentences used in the interpreting of police-suspect interview discourse in Korea. The findings of this analysis are as follows: First, the Korean police usually employed wh-interrogative sentences to ask for information from foreign suspects while using negative yes-no questions or declarative questions to refute the statements of foreign suspects. This attests to the fact that police officers use different types of interrogative sentences based on their investigation strategies. Second, foreign suspects made a number of questions about the intention of police officers’ questions or others. In particular, they asked questions the most when they were read their Miranda rights. This was mainly caused by the imbalance of knowledge between the two sides, which is one of the features found in institutional discourse. In the end, foreign suspects use a question as a means to protect their rights and make a statement favorable to themselves. Third, interpreters asked questions mainly about the case under examination to foreign suspects and police officers. This was also attributable to the imbalance of information and knowledge between the parties involved. In addition, interpreters sometimes asked additional questions to foreign suspects to get exact answers to the questions asked by police officers. This shows that interpreters use questions to confirm the accuracy of their interpretation or lead foreign suspects to provide answers appropriate to the questions police officers ask.

Tapes, transcripts and trials

This article addresses a serious, but currently unacknowledged, problem of evidential consistency regarding police-suspect interview evidence. It sheds light on flaws in current criminal procedure through the lens of linguistics, focusing on key stages of currently accepted practice which fly in the face of what linguists have long known about language. It demonstrates that, in stark contrast to the strict principles of preservation applied to physical evidence, interview data go through significant transformation between their creation in the interview room and their presentation in the courtroom, especially through changes in format between written and spoken text. It argues that, despite the safeguards provided by PACE 1984, there is nonetheless a level of routine distortion and contamination unintentionally built into the current system of presenting police interviews as evidence in England and Wales.

‘Are you going to tell me the truth today?’: Invoking obligations of honesty in police-suspect interviews.

Current police interviewing guidelines describe the investigative interview as a ‘search for truth’ (National Crime Faculty 2004). A wealth of social science literature treats ‘truth’ in the criminal justice system, like ‘honesty’, ‘lies’ and ‘deception’, as a product of individual intent and decision-making – an absolute which can be systematically observed and measured. Discourse analytic and conversation analytic methods were used to examine how police interviewers talked about ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ in three interviews with adult males suspected of sexual offences against children. What do references to ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ look like? Where are they positioned? How are they managed sequentially? The analysis revealed that ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ are locally invoked interactional resources, produced, recognised and contested in two very different sequential environments. Firstly, the interviewers set up a contractual obligation to ‘tell the truth’ at the outset of the interviews. These obligations comprise an expectation of truth, a direct request for truth and a reciprocal offer of truth. This contractual obligation is then revisited later in the interview as a resource to mark disjuncture between the testimonies of the suspect and the alleged victim and construct the suspect’s testimony as implausible. This article outlines some of the implications of these observations for the development of interviewing practice.

Audience design in the police interview: The interactional and judicial consequences of audience orientation

AbstractPolice-suspect interviews in England and Wales are a multi-audience, multi-purpose, transcontextual mode of discourse. They are conducted as part of the initial investigation into a crime, but are subsequently recontextualized through the judicial process, ultimately being presented in court as evidence against the interviewee. The communicative challenges posed by multiple future audiences are investigated by applying Bell's (1984) audience design model to the police interview, and the resulting “poor fit” demonstrates why this context is discursively counterintuitive to participants. Further, data analysis indicates that interviewer and interviewee, although ostensibly addressing each other, may orientate to different audiences, with potentially serious consequences. As well as providing new insight into police-suspect interview interaction, this article seeks to extend understanding of the influence of audience on interaction at the discourse level, and to contribute to the development of theoretical models for contexts with multiple or asynchronous audiences. (Audience design, audience orientation, police interviews, forensic linguistics)*

Addressing Psychological Vulnerability in the Police Suspect Interview

Addressing Psychological Vulnerability in the Police Suspect Interview

Interviewing to Detect Deception

DePaulo et al.’s (2003) meta-analysis of verbal and nonverbal cues to deception showed that cues to deception are faint and unreliable. If liars do not spontaneously display diagnostic cues to deceit, a logical step is to make sure that investigators elicit or enhance such cues in interviews through specific interview technique. Such interview techniques were scarce in the nonverbal and verbal cues to deception domain, but recently researchers have developed alternative protocols that have their roots in cognition and are based on the assumption that questions can be asked that are more difficult for liars to answer than for truth tellers. They will be discussed in the first part of this article. Traditionally, lie detection in a forensic context concentrated on police-suspect interview settings. However, in the wake of high-profile international terrorist attacks, the importance of identifying terrorist networks and gathering intelligence about the activities of such groups has become paramount. Deception detection in intelligence interviews differs in several ways from deception detection in traditional police-suspect interviews and requires innovative deception research. In the second part of this article we discuss the emerging literature in this domain.

When Silence Means Acceptance

This article presents a linguistic analysis of police-suspect interviews with a focus on the right to silence. The author, a linguist, seeks to introduce the legal community to a linguistic understanding of the way that a person might invoke their right to silence and explain how the rules of conversation will have a critical impact on the potential for adverse inference. Extracts from police interviews are analysed using a Conversation Analysis framework, drawing on the notion of 'preference' and adjacency pair structures in particular. The analysis finds that a preference for denials following accusations will problematise any attempts by the suspect to offer a non-response to a police accusation and that, in accordance with conversational rules governing preference, non-response will be interpreted by participants and future audiences as an acceptance of the accusation.

'Do You Agree that she would have been Frightened?': An Investigation of Discursive Practices in Police-Suspect Interviews

'Do You Agree that she would have been Frightened?': An Investigation of Discursive Practices in Police-Suspect Interviews

`You Punched Him, didn't You?': Versions of Violence in Accusatory Interviews

This paper explores the management in police-suspect interviews of accusations of violent involvement. Eleven officially taperecorded interviews between police and suspects were transcribed and analysed and a basic grammar of violent accusations was identified. Different ways in which accusations are warranted and contested are discussed and instantiated. It is suggested that the interview participants use two discourses of violence: disorderly and justificatory. The paper explores their localized deployment and raises issues concerning their wider ideological implications.