"What happened?": from talk to text in police interrogations

Language & Communication xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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Language & Communication

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‘‘What happened?’’ From talk to text in police interrogations

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.01.0020271-5309/� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Please cite this article in press as: van Charldorp, T.C. ‘‘What happened?’’ From talk to text in police interrogations. Lang. Commun.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.01.002

Tessa C. van Charldorp ⇑Department of Language & Communication, Faculty of Humanities, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online xxxx

Keywords:Police interrogationPolice recordConversation analysisStorytellingTalkText

a b s t r a c t

Based on 11 interrogations and police records, I examine how stories are elicited, told andwritten up during the police interrogation. In the process of transforming a spoken story toa written story, we see several transformations. The written story is a more factual,detailed, precise and intentional story on paper constructed according to the institutionalperspective of the officer. Whether the stories are told freely by the suspect, supervised orimposed by the officer, police officers adhere to their own structure and chronology of howthey make events understandable. This is accomplished through further questioning, inter-rupting or by telling the story themselves. This process of institutionalization alreadybegins in the interaction and continues when transforming talk to text.

� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

As this special issue demonstrates, quoting from the case file, or in some cases, re-enacting in speech facts of the case, areimportant activities that play a large role in the courtroom setting across various countries. The documents that provide thebasis for these quotations and re-enactments should therefore be adequate representations of what transpired before thewritten document was constructed and became a quotable source. How these documents, which are at the start of the tex-tual chain in the judicial process, are constructed, will be the main focus of this article.

I will specifically look at one type of document that is used in the courtroom setting: the police record of the suspect’sinterrogation. In the Dutch police interrogation setting, producing an account of ‘what happened’ on paper is one of the goalsof the police interrogation: to write up a report, as much as possible in the suspect’s own words, about the events reported inthe interrogation. It is the story in this report that matters in the further judicial process (cf. Komter, 2006; Rock, 2001;Jönsson and Linell, 1991) as it not only forms one of the backbones of the casefile (France: see Licoppe, this issue; theNetherlands: see Komter, 2013), but that story can also serve as a piece of evidence in court.

In this article I examine how such stories are elicited and told during the police interrogation and what happens in theprocess when the suspect’s version of events is written up and becomes a written version of the events that happened. This isthe first step in the textual chain that demonstrates the institutional changes that occur in the interaction itself and whentalk is transformed to text. In the written documents, however, we see no traces of this process of institutionalization. Vander Houwen and Sneijder (this issue) examine the next phase in the textual and judicial chain and investigate how judges,lawyers and prosecutors quote from these written documents in the Dutch courtroom setting.

In order to examine how the talk is transformed to an institutionalized, legal, text, I begin with an analysis of the storysolicitation and storytelling. Amongst the Dutch interrogations that I recorded, there are three different ways in which thesuspect tells a story in interaction with the police officer. First of all, the suspect is invited to produce a longer turn at talk in

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2 T.C. van Charldorp / Language & Communication xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

which the suspect tells a story from beginning to end. Second, the suspect starts telling a story, but the police officer inter-rupts the suspect immediately and through that interruption he or she steers the storytelling. Third, the story is not told bythe suspect himself,1 but by the officer who imposes a story. This occurs when either the suspect refuses to tell a story, or thestory is not the correct story according to the police officer. In either circumstance, the police officer provides a version of thestory that the suspect agrees or disagrees with. These various ways of soliciting and telling a story result in different institu-tional texts in which we see various changes made to the structure and level of details of the story as well as intent. How thesetexts were constructed, however, is often not visible in the written documents.

2. Storytelling in institutional settings

According to Mandelbaum (2003: 596), ‘‘storytelling is a basic method by which we share experiences, and in sharingexperiences we undertake such important social processes as joking, performing delicate activities, complaining, accounting,telling troubles, gossiping, and constructing relationships, social roles, and social and institutional realities.’’ In other words,we produce and achieve all sorts of social actions by telling stories. Stories then, are an important resource in interaction(Schiffrin et al., 2010). Researchers in various disciplines such as (socio)linguistics (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov,2004, 2010; Tannen, 1982), communication studies (Mandelbaum, 2003), conversation analysis (Jefferson, 1978; Lerner,1992), anthropology (Briggs and Bauman, 1992), and psychology (Bruner, 2010) study stories by all sorts of people in all sortsof situations that serve all sorts of functions.

As the suspects’ stories analyzed here demonstrate, stories also feature prominently in institutional interaction. At thedoctor’s office patients tell stories (sometimes through answering ‘‘more than the question’’) about their past or their homesituation (Stivers and Heritage, 2001; see also Jones, 2009). During refugee status interviews, refugees are required to talkabout their past (Blommaert, 2001) and in court witnesses and suspects are continually invited to tell and retell versionsof events (Eades, 2008/9). During police interrogations (Rock, 2001, 2010; Jönsson and Linell, 1991) or at-the-scene policequestioning (Kidwell, 2009), suspects and witnesses are asked to tell stories about what happened.

A characteristic feature of such storytelling in institutional settings is that the stories are embedded in a very specific typeof context. Often they are not offered voluntarily, but elicited by the professional for a particular goal or function. Within eachspecific context, stories serve different purposes. Whereas during the doctor–patient interview stories are elicited to explainsymptoms, in the police interrogation or at the crime scene stories are elicited to uncover the truth about what happened.There are therefore many ways in which stories are solicited and told, depending on the context and the function of the story.

2.1. Structure of stories

According to Labov and Waletzky, telling a story or a narrative represents a ‘‘method of recapitulating past experience bymatching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred’’ (1967: 20). Hence, ‘‘narrative con-struction follows the order of events in time’’ (Labov, 2006: 37). Along similar lines, Ochs (2004: 270) states in her first nar-rative lesson that ‘‘[n]arratives of personal experience imbue unexpected life events with a temporal and causal orderliness.’’Labov and Waletzky’s analyses of the structure of stories of personal experience show the following general structure: ori-entation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda. In the orientation section, the storyteller orients the listenerby introducing the people involved, the location, the time and behavioural orientation. The complicating action refers to theevents that occurred that led up to the resolution. Before providing the resolution, however, storytellers often provide anevaluation of the activities that occurred that shows how the narrator felt towards the narrative. After the evaluation andresolution, there may be an additional section referred to as the coda. Here, the storyteller returns ‘‘the verbal perspectiveto the present moment’’ (1967: 39). Storytellers can do this through the use of the traditional ‘‘and they lived happily everafter’’ or for example by saying ‘‘and that was that.’’ Narratives thus revolve around some kind of important happening, whatLabov and Waletzky (1967) refer to as ‘‘the most reportable event.’’ In Goodwin’s analysis (1984) we see that the story con-tains a preface, background and climax section, where the climax is equivalent to a ‘‘most reportable event’’ or an eventworth telling to your audience. Labov (2010) shows that reportable events can also be told at the very beginning of a nar-rative, in the orientation or abstract.

Many of these observations on narratives of personal experience also hold for the stories told by the suspects in the inter-rogation room, hence I will continue to use the terminology developed by Labov and Waletzky for analyzing the structures ofthe spoken and written stories.

2.2. Interactional organization

Stories are not produced by an isolated individual but interactively constructed. In an everyday context they are elicitedthrough a request sequence (Goodwin, 1984). And while the storyteller generally occupies a longer turn-at-talk when deliv-ering the story, the other participants contribute as well by providing continuers, acknowledgements and surprise reactions,asking clarifying questions, and collaboratively evaluating and assessing the story afterwards (see Schegloff, 1982; Goodwin,

1 All suspects in my data are male and I will therefore refer to suspects as he.

Please cite this article in press as: van Charldorp, T.C. ‘‘What happened?’’ From talk to text in police interrogations. Lang. Commun. (2014),http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.01.002


T.C. van Charldorp / Language & Communication xxx (2014) xxx–xxx 3

1984; Lerner, 1992). Story recipients then, also play an important role in the construction of the story. Lerner demonstratesthat sometimes there may be three or more participants who co-construct a story (1992). In his examples, other participants‘‘assist’’ the storyteller by ‘‘employing shared knowledge of events that form the source of the story’’ (Lerner, 1992: 248).

In police interrogation settings as well, the police officer does not merely solicit the story but actively co-constructs it bymeans of acknowledgements, continuers, sometimes with inserted questions, and also through typing (see van Charldorp,2011). The narrative is thus ‘‘steered’’ in many ways: acknowledging an answer indicates that the officer has heard the pre-vious utterance, providing a continuer encourages the suspect to continue talking, asking a question solicits an answer andtyping indicates that the officer has found the previous interaction recordable (Komter, 2006). Some officers begin activelyco-constructing the story right at the beginning, whereas others wait until the suspect has told a complete version of thestory and only then do they begin asking additional questions and/or typing.

What is particularly different about stories in the police interrogation room is that they are not only just spoken stories,but they also become written stories. In my police interrogation material we have a spoken story elicited by the officer andtold (mostly) by the suspect and we have a written story that is based on the spoken story, but solely written by the officer.This data then provides us with two different versions, or ‘generations’ of the same story (Jönsson and Linell, 1991). We canalso refer to this as the recontexualisation of discourse, extricating some part of the text or discourse and fitting this in an-other text, discourse or genre (Linell, 1998; see also Briggs and Bauman, 1992).

Jönsson and Linell (1991) analyzed the different ‘generations’ with a corpus of 30 stories told during police interrogationsand their written versions in the Swedish police interrogation setting. They found that the written stories show a more vis-ible narrative structure, the language is more precise, the tone is more neutral (no emotional or value-ridden features), theevents within the story are written up as if they are a ‘‘series of rational and planned actions’’ (p. 434), and it is often unclearwho contributed to what piece of the story (the suspect or the officer). Rock (2001) points out that these stories in the state-ments do not make any reference to the context in which the statements were drawn up. Just like Komter, who demonstratesthat the ‘‘interrogator’s activities are ‘‘noticeably absent’’ in [the] text’’ (2006: 222), Rock states that people who later readthe stories in the records are ‘‘not typically urged to consider what questions might have been asked by a police officer dur-ing the taking of a statement’’ (2001: 47). In her analyses she also finds that specific additional information is added to thestatements, such as very specific references to time.

What is different about these Swedish and English interrogations is that the officer makes notes on paper during the inter-rogation. In England, the statements that Rock used in her analysis remained handwritten, whereas in Sweden the officertyped up the police record only after the interrogation was complete. In the Netherlands, the police record is generally typedup while the officer is interrogating.2 This is either done by the same officer, or by a second officer. With my data I will not onlyshow how the stories are elicited and told and what elements are transformed in the written version, but I will also demonstratehow these transformations take place and how the interaction plays a role in constructing the second generation of the story.

Of course it is not a new phenomenon that changes take place when spoken language is transformed to a written text.When talk is transformed into text, as in other institutional talk such as a survey interview, we see how the spoken answersfrom the respondents must ‘‘fit’’ into the standardized forms on paper or on the computer (for example, see Maynard andSchaeffer, 2006). Jones (2009) shows a similar negotiation process when nurses adapt the patients’ answers to the fields thatare given on the form. Clayman (1990) describes the transformation that takes place from spoken to written language withinthe news interview setting. In this transformation the original questions asked by the reporter are often left out of the writ-ten version. In all of these studies we see that spoken and written language differ from each other and we also see that themedium and the institutional context (cf. Drew, 2006) play a role in these transformations.

In this paper one type of discourse (talk in the interrogation) forms the basis for another type of discourse (text in thepolice record). The process of intertextuality, however, doesn’t stop there. This police record is then used in a new setting,far removed from its original context, and quoted from or re-enacted by various parties such as the judges, lawyers and pros-ecutors. It is therefore not only necessary that the written record is an adequate representation of what transpired before-hand, but the context of its production should also be understood. After the data and method are laid out in the next section Iwill turn to the analyses in which I will demonstrate how the interactional construction of the suspect’s story affects the wayin which the written record is produced.

3. Data and method

The data used for the analyses in this article were collected for my PhD project in 2007 and 2008. The data consists offifteen interrogations and fifteen police records. The interrogations were recorded with an audio recorder and transcribedusing Jefferson’s (2004) transcription system (see Appendix A). All transcripts and records were anonymized. Analysiswas done on the original texts, which were later translated into English. For this paper I used eleven out of fifteen interro-gations and records. Within this collection there are three interrogations where a ‘‘free’’ story is told which is followed byfurther questioning. There are four examples of a supervised story, and four examples where the officer imposes the storyand the suspect agrees or disagrees. For a full description of the data see van Charldorp (2011).

2 Writing up the police record during the interrogation is common for medium-sized cases (theft, burglary, money laundering, etc.), which are the cases thatare analyzed here. Bigger crimes (murder, manslaughter, rape) are generally audio and/or video recorded and a police record is typed up afterwards.




As far as my analyses are concerned, I relied on conversation analysis (CA) to unpack how it is that actions are producedand interpreted in the course of police interrogations. Actions such as controlling the agenda of the talk, summarizing thesuspect’s talk, being defensive or demonstrating selective interest in a suspect’s story are achieved through interaction. Fur-thermore, CA shows us how the participants themselves manage and coordinate these actions and we see how technology(such as a computer) plays a role in the coordination of actions.

In order to understand and analyze the structure of the stories and the written police records, insights from discourseanalysis (DA) also proved helpful. I treat DA the way Johnstone describes the field in the introduction of her book ‘DiscourseAnalysis’ 2008). I see DA as a research method with which you pay systematic attention to ‘‘to every possible element of thepotential meaning of a stretch of talk or writing’’ (2008: xiv). Johnstone (2008: 9) remarks that the basic questions a dis-course analyst asks are: ‘‘Why is this stretch of discourse the way it is? Why is it no other way? Why these particular wordsin this particular order?’’ Through answering these questions in combination with insights from the conversation analyticanalyses I explored the relations between talk and text in this research.

4. Analysis

In the analyses below I will set out the three different types of stories that are told in the police interrogation room andcompare them to the written versions in order to show what happened when moving from talk to text.

4.1. ‘‘Free’’ stories

In this section I use one interrogation to demonstrate how ‘‘free’’ stories are elicited, told and responded to in interaction.These ‘‘free’’ stories are typically followed by further, specific questioning. The end of this section explores how the writtenstory differs from the spoken story.

4.1.1. Soliciting and telling a ‘‘free’’ storyIn this first example a suspect (S) is interrogated by one police officer (P) whose task is also to write up the suspect’s story

in a police record format. The suspect has been arrested for stealing a motorbike. He claims at the beginning of the interro-gation (not shown here) that he is innocent. According to him, he had borrowed what he thought was a moped3 from a friendon the street (the police later confirmed that this was a motorbike and not a moped and that the motorbike had recently beenstolen). After the story solicitation from the officer in line 16, which is simply delivered through the imperative ‘tell’, the suspectbegins to narrate how he was arrested the previous night, starting from line 24.

Example 1 (TCint08min18)

3

to

Ph

14

Mope45 km

lease cttp://d

P:

ds (eiper h

ite thx.doi

nou je zit hier onschuldig;a

well you’re here not guilty;

15 S: ja=

yes=

16
P: =vertel,
=tell,

((7 lines omitted))

24 S: =nou (.) (h)et begint precies ;zo.
=well (.) it begins exactly like ;this.
25
ik zou t met me vriendin gaan poolen,
I was t going to play pool with my girlfriend,

26 (0.3) gistere avond,

(0.3) last night,

27
P: ja.
yes.

28 S: maar ik liep zeg maar richting haar "huis,
but i walked like in the direction of her "house,
29
en ik zag (.) g- gewoon n paar jongens van de straat die ik "kent, and I saw (.) j- just n couple of guys that I "know from the street,
ther called brommer or scooter in Dutch) are motorized vehicles for which you need a special moped license. These vehicles can officially drive upour and a helmet is obligatory. The legal driving age is 16. Mopeds are quite popular amongst the Dutch youth.

is article in press as: van Charldorp, T.C. ‘‘What happened?’’ From talk to text in police interrogations. Lang. Commun. (2014),.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.01.002



Plh

30

ease cttp://d

ite thx.doi

(0.4)

31
dus ik vroeg aan "een van ze van,
so i asked "one of them like,

32
of ik ze scooter effe moch lenen om mn vriendin op te halen,
if i could borrow his moped for a minute to pick up my girlfriend,

33 (1)

34 P: ohkee:,

ohkay:,

35
S: ehj (.) hij zeg tegen mij,
ehj (.) he says to me,

36 ja is goed maar je moet m snel terug brengen.

yeah is fine but you have to bring it back quickly.

37
(0.4)
38
.h dus ik haal haar "op, (.)
.h so i pick her "up, (.)

39
en ik (.) breng haar alvast richting t cafeetje zeg maar,
and i (.) bring her in the direction of the café already you know,

40 waar we zouden poolen (.) en ondertussen (1)

where we were going to play pool (.) .h and in the mean time, (1)

41
werd ik werd ik aangehouden,
i was stopped.

42 omdat ik eigenlijk geen helm op had,

actually because i wasn’t wearing a helmet,

43
ik had haar die helm zeg maar >gegeven<.
i had >given< her the helmet you know.

44
.hh zodat ik dach ja dan neem ik die boete maar als ik word aangehouden.
.hh so that i thought yeah then I’ll take the fine if I’m stopped.

45
P: >okay<,
>okay<,

46
S: dus achteraf word ik aangehouden,
so afterwards i was stopped,

47 maar g ehm (0.5) "eerst begon zo,

but g ehm (0.5) "first it started like this,

48
die: kenteken klopt niet van die scooter?
the: license plate of the moped is not right?

49 P: ja.

yes.

50
S: (temoest ik mee naar t) bureau,
(thn i had to go with t) station.

51 en op des-

and at sta-

52
de bureau zeiden ze, (.)
the station they said, (.)

53
dat de scooter ge;sto:len was.
that the moped was ;sto:len.

(continued on next page)




Ph

54

lease cttp://d

ite thx.doi

(1)

55
P: "ja. "yes.
56
S: toen was het echt toen dacht ik echt van <sshitt>.
then it was really then i really thought like <sshitt>.

57 (1)

58 P: nou ben je de pineut=

now you’re in for it=

59
S: =ja.
=yes.

60 (0.8)

61
P: okay. (1)
okay. (1)

a For transcription conventions, see Appendix A.

By explicitly repeating that the suspect claims to be innocent (line 14), the officer embeds her story elicitation question inthe context of the police interrogation where finding out if the suspect is guilty or innocent is one of the overarching goals. Bypointing out the contradiction: you’re in custody where you only end up if we have a reason to believe you’re guilty of acrime AND you’re innocent, the officer frames her elicitation question in such a way that the suspect now has to explainthe contradiction. The story elicitation vertel (‘tell’) therefore elicits a ‘prove to me you’re innocent’ story. Such a story stim-ulus, in Labov and Waletzky’s terms, is relevant to the analysis of the narrative as it tells us the function it has been elicitedfor (1967:20).

The suspect’s story begins with the discourse marker nou (‘well’ or ‘now’) in line 24, which is frequently used as a turninitiator marking the beginning of a longer turn (Sacks et al., 1974). By using such a discourse marker at the beginning of ananswer or a story, the speaker shows ‘‘orientation to the conversational demand for an answer’’ (Schiffrin, 1987: 110), but atthe same time delays the actual beginning of the story. Nevertheless, the suspect orients to a longer turn at talk.

Following the discourse particle ‘well’, the suspect shows an orientation to the institutional setting in which the ‘‘whathappened’’ question should be answered. By announcing how the story exactly unfolded in line 24, the suspect marks thathe has the knowledge to tell the story. He furthermore orients to telling a precise story, which was not solicited for by thesolicitation ‘tell’ but is an institutional requirement within the police interrogation setting. The suspect foregrounds that hewas there whereas the officer was not. When the suspect begins to tell his story in line 25, using the Dutch verb zou(‘would’) + infinitive gaan (‘going to’) that is used for hypothetical situations or situations that never occurred (translatedas the past of ‘be going to’), he prepares the listener for a story that will explain why he never got to play pool with his girl-friend. Furthermore, the suspect introduces the characters (the suspect and his girlfriend), the time (last night) and place (onthe way to the pool centre) of the story, what Labov and Waletzky (1967) refer to as the orientation. The orientation depictsan ordinary event: going to play pool in the evening with your partner. It is not surprising that the suspect’s story that led tohis arrest begins with such an ordinary activity. Storytellers, according to Sacks (1984), are constantly doing ‘being an ordin-ary person’. Kidwell (2009) also shows that answerers in at-the-scene police questioning ‘begin their narratives by depictingthemselves involved in utterly mundane activities’ and shows how answerers use the English term ‘just’ to establish(extra)ordinariness. This again adds to the suspect’s orientation to a longer turn at talk. He is engaged in telling a ‘‘free’’ story.

The officer aids the construction of the ‘‘free’’ story by merely confirming (lines 27, 34, 45, 49 and 55). After the first con-firmation from the officer (line 27), the suspect introduces what Labov and Waletzky (1967) refer to as the complicating ac-tion. The suspect begins his telling of his night out with the ordinary activity of walking to his girlfriend’s house. On the waythere, he saw ‘‘j- just n couple of guys that I know from the street’’ and he asked one of them if he could borrow his moped.These activities are normalized by using the term gewoon (‘just’ or literally translated as ‘normally’) (line 29), letting the offi-cer know that he ‘knows’ these guys and by using ‘for a minute’ (line 32). The officer merely listens and occasionally confirmswith a yes or an okay. By doing this, she allows the suspect to continue telling his version of events.

The pause and stretched ohkee (okay) in lines 33 and 34 show a delayed continuer response token from the officer whichis noticeably different from the response tokens in lines 45, 49 and 55 which are produced much quicker and have a hearableconfirming intonation. Although the ohkee: (line 34) encourages the suspect to continue, the pause and stretch also suggestthat the officer expects to hear more. With this minimal utterance, she again leaves the floor open for the suspect to freelycontinue his story.

The suspect freely continues with an elaboration of the complicating action (Labov and Waletzky, 1967) in lines 35–40and the resolution (Labov and Waletzky, 1967) in lines 40–44: being stopped by the police. The resolution continues inlines 46–53 in which the suspect provides details of why exactly he was arrested. The suspect, who has been encouraged




throughout the narrative so far to produce longer turns at talk, returns to a first person evaluation in line 56 (‘then it wasreally then i really thought like <sshitt>.’), a typical way to end a story (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). The collaborative eval-uation ends with another discourse marker ‘ohkay’ from the officer who ends the story within this institutional setting andshifts frames from the suspect’s ‘‘free’’ storytelling to the police officer going back to interrogating, the main task at hand.

In this story solicitation and story response, we see that the suspect is provided interactional space to tell an elaboratestory. The police officer invites a longer turn at talk, encourages the suspect to continue telling his story and does not inter-rupt. This allows the suspect to tell a story according to the typical storytelling structure that we know from Labov and Wale-tzky’s analyses. Throughout this typical storytelling structure we see an additional feature that constantly returns: thesuspect is doing being innocent in all sorts of ways. However, the officer has so far not typed up anything. The suspect’s an-swer thus far is not yet recordable (Komter, 2006). Before she begins typing up the police record, she asks a few specific ques-tions as can be seen in the next paragraph.

4.1.2. Further questioning and typingThe ‘‘free’’ storytelling phase ends in line 61 (see Example 1). In line 62 of the example below (which is a continuation of

Example 1), the officer introduces the ‘‘further questioning’’ phase with effetjes (‘real quick’).


Plh

62

ease citttp://dx

e this ar.doi.org/

.h effetjes eh,

.h real quick eh,

63 jij jij ging vanaf je huis?

you you went from your house?

64
mijehof?
mijehof?

65 na-

to-

66
richting,
in the direction of,

67
of hoe moet k t zien?
or how should I see this?

68
je zei ik ging naar mn vriendin.
you said I went to my girlfriend.

69
lo[pend
wa[lking

70 S: [ja ik ging lo[pend

[yes I went wa[lking to my girlfriend,

71
P: [waar woont je vriendin?
[where does your girlfriend live? xx

72 S: eh ze woont eh,

eh she lives eh,

73
bij diamant?
near diamant?

74
P: okee
okay.

a
75 P: xx xx=
a Typing sounds have been transcribed with x’s.

In lines 63–67 the police officer explains that she wants to know how to visualize the route. The suggested starting loca-tion, the suspect’s house at Mijehof (lines 63–64), is not confirmed by the suspect. Only after the officer repeats the suspect’swords that he went by foot to his girlfriend (lines 68–69) does the suspect confirm. This example demonstrates that the offi-cer specifically solicits names of locations. She names the location of the suspect’s house (line 64) and specifically asks for thename of the location of his girlfriend’s house (line 71). The solicitation for such precise facts is similar to what Jönsson andLinell (1991) found in Swedish police interrogations that are transformed to text. Only when the officer has received the

ticle in press as: van Charldorp, T.C. ‘‘What happened?’’ From talk to text in police interrogations. Lang. Commun. (2014),10.1016/j.langcom.2014.01.002



additional information does she begin typing. At the end of this clarification section, the officer shifts frames with okee(‘okay’) in line 74. Hereafter she begins to write her recycled version of the suspect’s story. In order to put this recycled ver-sion in the computer she begins combining the activities of typing and further questioning.

4.1.3. Written storyOn paper, the story reads as follows:

Example 3 (PR-int08)U vraagt mij wat er gisterenavond gebeurd is.

Ik liep gisterenavond vanaf Witteveen richting het huis van mijn vriendin, zij woont op Diamant. Ik

zou haar om 22:00 ophalen omdat wij zouden gaan poolen. Ik liep daar alleen.

Vlakbij het OSC zag ik een groep van ongeveer zeven jongens staan die ik ken. Ik ken de jongens van de

straat, een van hen heet Zachary. Ik noem hem Zigi. Er stonden ook een paar brommers.

You ask me what happened last night.

Last night I walked from Witteveen in the direction of my girlfriend’s house, she lives at Diamant. I

was going to pick her up at 22.00 because we were going to play pool. I was walking there alone.

Near the OSC I saw a group of about seven guys whom I know. I know the guys from the street, one of them

is called Zachary. I call him Zigi. There were also a couple of mopeds.

If we compare the written version of the story to the story that the suspect initially told the officer (Example 1), we seethat the suspect’s innocent activities of going to play pool, walking to his girlfriend’s house, and meeting friends remain.However, we also see some important differences.

First of all, the written text is presented as a volunteered story delivered in response to the question ‘what happened lastnight?’ The format of the report suggests that no further questions were asked. Specifically, the police record suggests thatthe suspect volunteered phrases such as ‘she lives at Diamant’, whereas in fact the interrogator elicited this information afterthe completion of the initial story. The location (‘near the OSC’), the number of guys (‘seven’), the name and nickname of oneof the guys (‘one of them is called Zachary’ and ‘I call him Zigi’), and other additional information (‘there were also a couple ofmopeds’) were thus not part of the initial spoken story but of the suspect’s response to very specific questions posed by theofficer during the ensuing questioning phase (for a full analysis see van Charldorp, 2011). Since these questions have beenleft out in the written document, the reader is provided no information about how the written answer came to be con-structed (see also Komter, 2006 and Rock, 2001).

Secondly, the elicitation question vertel (‘tell’) (line 16 of Example 1) is rephrased as a recontextualisation phrase (Komter,2013): ‘You ask me what happened last night.’ By doing this, the ‘‘interrogator reworks [her] own questions, remarks, or sug-gestions into the narrative’’ while still using the first-person perspective (Komter, 2013). Such recontextualisation phrases,Komter claims, ‘‘ensure [the officers’] visibility’’ in the police records. In this case, the question that is entered in the policerecord is much more formal and elaborate than the one used in the original encounter. It also presupposes that somethinghappened (also see Kidwell, 2009) and thereby presents the suspect’s story as ‘‘about something he might have done’’, whilethe original spoken story sketched the events that led to his arrest and was offered in response.

Thirdly, the order of events has slightly changed. The suspect began his story by telling that he was going to play pool. Inthe written text, the officer begins by describing the activity of walking from location A in the direction of location B. Withinthis first sentence, the characters, time and location are laid out. The time is then further specified in the next sentence‘22.00’ (cf. Rock, 2001). Only hereafter the reason for picking up his girlfriend is given: because we were going to play pool.By moving the activity of walking to the initial position of the written story, the story has a different emphasis than the spo-ken version in which going to play pool was the initial utterance. Beginning a story with ‘I was going to play pool’, suggeststhat the suspect was planning on doing a very ordinary activity and that something happened on the way. Going to play poolwas the ‘most reportable event.’ By beginning a story with ‘Last night I walked from A to B’, the construction of the past of thephrase ‘be going to’ has disappeared, as has the most reportable event. The officer, simply by writing up the story in a dif-ferent order, is not only institutionalizing the suspect’s story, but also changing its perspective (cf. Johnson, 2008).

The ‘‘free’’ story as told by the suspect provided the basic story for the written document – one in which the suspect isrelatively innocent and where events happen in general chronological order. In the ‘‘further questioning’’ phase we saw thatthe officer sought specific details that were added to the suspect’s story on paper. Furthermore, by leaving out the questionsthat were asked during this phase, by adding a recontextualisation phrase and by slightly adapting the structure, the sus-pect’s version of events becomes a more factual, coherent, intentional story than the one he freely produced in interaction.The written text, however, provides no insight into this process.

4.2. Supervised stories

Not all officers allow for an extensive turn at talk after asking the ‘what happened’ question. And, simultaneously, not allsuspects tell a complete story that follows the typical storytelling structure that we saw in Example 1. In this section I will




take a look at stories that are almost immediately interrupted and then supervised by the police officer. Here, I will again useone interrogation. Byron, a minor, has been arrested together with two of his friends for threatening a victim with a knife in agarage and stealing his iPod.

4.2.1. Soliciting and supervising a storyIn this first extract we see that the police officer is finishing up his typing activity (lines 1, 3 and 4) while asking the sus-

pect ‘what do you have to state about this?’ (line 2). Here, ‘this’ refers to being arrested because of a street robbery (notshown here).


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xxx[xxxxx

2 [en wat heb je hierover [te verklaren?

[and what do you have to state [about this?

3
[X x x x x x x
4
x x x x x x
5 S: wat er is gebeurd?

what has happened?

6
P: ja,
yes,

7
x
8
S: [naou,
[well,

9
P: [x
10 S: ik [was [gewoon [gister,

I [was [just [yesterday,

11
P: [x [X [X
12
x
13 S: [gavon [en manilo,

[gavon [and manilo,

14
P: [x [x x
15
S: was ik in die box.
I was in that garage.

16
(1)
17
en daar gewoon beetje �gaan� zitten chillen,
and was just sitting there �a bit� chillin,’

18 P: hmnn mnn.

hmnn mnn.

19
S: op een gegeven moment was die sleutel stuk gaan, at a certain moment that key was broken,
20 in et slot.
in tha lock.
21
P: s-
22
heel even, just a minute,
23
want je me- mis e�v�en stukje, because you me- missing a �li�ttle piece,
24 ga jou een beetje bijsturen hoor,
going to steer you a bit allright,



As we can see above, the open story solicitation in line 2 is not much different to the story solicitation in the example ofthe ‘‘free’’ story. However, this suspect is soon interrupted. The suspect, similar to the suspect in Example 1, begins telling hisstory with the nou (‘well’) discourse marker in line 8. Further, he explicitly uses the ordinariness marker ‘‘just’’ in lines 10 and17 (Sacks, 1984; Kidwell, 2009). When the suspect tells the officer that the key was broken in the lock, right after telling himthey were ‘just sitting there a bit chillin’’, the officer interrupts the story (line 21). According to Labov and Waletzky’s nar-rative analysis terms, the suspect went straight from the orientation (sitting in the garage) to the resolution (key was bro-ken). The complicating action that led to the key being broken has been left out and this is exactly the information that theofficer seeks: what went on in that garage before the key in the lock broke (as we will later see). The police officer not onlyinterrupts the suspect’s story but also literally suggests that he is going to ‘steer’ him ‘a bit’ (line 24). The officer holds thefloor and tells the suspect he wants to hear his version of events from – what the officer believes to be – the beginning (line33), as is shown in the example below.


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((8 lines omitted))

33
i- ik wil vanaf het begin horen, I- I want to hear from the beginning,
34
jje lo:pen,
yyou ((singular)) wa:lking,

35
of jullie zijn eh in de straat,
or you ((plural)) are eh in the street,

36
b:ij dingen,
a:t what’s his name,

37
jullie zien,
you ((plural)) see,

38
mervellino.
mervellino.

39
S: ja, yes,
40 P: laten we daarmee beginnen,

let us begin there,

41
S: ja,
yes,

The police officer very explicitly co-constructs the suspect’s story. The officer provides the characters in lines 34–35 (jullieor ‘you’ plural), location in line 35 (in de straat or ‘in the street’) and the complicating action in lines 36–38 (they see thevictim Mervellino). The suspect confirms this new story beginning (line 39) after which the officer responds laten we daarmeebeginnen (‘let’s begin there’), where ‘us’, rather than ‘you’, explicitly suggests co-construction (line 40) (cf. Lerner, 1992;Goodwin, 1984; Schegloff, 1982).

In Example 6 we see that the suspect then begins telling a new version of the story. He continues where the officer left off:seeing the victim, Mervellino, on the street (as we just saw in Example 5). The officer soon again interrupts the suspect (lines47–48):

44 S: dus gingen we een beetje pra:tuh,
o we were ta:lkin’ a bit uh,

45 praten praten praten.

talking talking talking.

46
uiteindelijk zei een van [( )
in the end one of them said like [( )

47
P: [okee.
[okay.

48
waarover gingen jullie praten?
what about were you ((plural)) talking?




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waarie vandaan kwam,

where he came from,

50
hij kwam van z’n sstage ofzo:,
he came from his internship or somethi:ng,

51
P: �prima�. �fine�.
52
S: (offuh)
(or uh)

53 P: en dan valt "iets op. (2)

and then you notice "something. (2)

54
S: ja.
yes.

55 hij had koptelefoon.

he had headphones.

56
P: goed zo.
good job.

The suspect’s repetition of ‘talking’ (line 45) suggests they talked a lot but does not specify what they talked about. Using‘in the end’ in his next utterance (line 46) suggests that something transpired during the conversation. However, the suspectleaves out this part of the story – what they observed about the victim before they entered the garage where the victimwould eventually be robbed. That the officer is specifically seeking this part of the story becomes noticeable when the officerinterrupts and first marks agreement with the story thus far (line 47) and then seeks completeness by specifically askingwhat they talked about (line 48).

Throughout the suspect’s story, the officer asks additional questions, soliciting further information about the compli-cating action, as can be seen in 47–48 and in line 53. When the suspect answers, he receives third turn acknowledgementssuch as ‘fine’ (line 51) and ‘well done’ (line 56). Such evaluations are not common in institutional talk (Drew and Heritage,1992), but in this context the evaluations tell the suspect that he is telling the ‘correct’ version of what happened accord-ing to the officer. Such evaluations of the answers restrict the suspect’s ability to freely narrate his story, which is in starkcontrast to what we saw in Example 1, but also to what police officers are advised to do in the training literature (forexample, Van den Adel, 1997; for police interviews with children, see Aldridge, 2010; for an overview on Dutch policetraining literature, see Sliedrecht, 2013). Not only do these evaluations steer the way the story is told, but by seeking acomplete and ‘correct’ story, the officer shows the suspect that he already knows what has happened and that the purposeof eliciting a story in this institutional interaction is not to hear something new, but to check if the suspect’s version ofevents complies with other versions of the story that the officer has heard before. Although this suspect has never told hisversion of events to this officer before, the officer has already read the victim report and has interrogated one of the othersuspects in this case. The supervision therefore is guided by previous knowledge. This in turn shapes how the suspect tellshis version of events in the interaction.

The evaluation in line 51 is followed by a question in line 53 that holds the presupposition that the suspect noticed ‘some-thing’. This question is very similar to the types of questions that Johnson (2008) describes in which police officers transformsuspect’s stories from a minimal responsibility story to one that admits responsibility and sometimes even admission ofguilt. The story that started out by the suspect sitting in a garage (Example 4), has now been transformed into one wherehe saw the victim on the street, noticed the victim’s headphones, and hereafter the suspect and his friends invited the victiminto the garage. Since the suspect has been arrested for threatening the victim to steal his iPod, the suspect has now admittedto possible intent: he knew the victim had an iPod (or at least headphones) on him before inviting him into the garage.

After the suspect finishes his story, the officer asks more specific questions about a knife (not shown here). The officerthen asks why they pulled the victim into the garage (line 114 below), after which the suspect answers that his friendswanted something from the victim.

Example 7 (Tcint3min27)
111 P: ohkee (2) e::n .h (2) mervellino,
ohkay (2) a::nd .h (2) mervellino,

112
die werd in die box getrokken.
he was pulled into the garage.

(continued on next page)




Ph

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ja.

yeah.

114
P: waarom? (3)
why? (3)

115
S: (zeiden ook wou) dat ze iets van hem �wilde� ofzo, (they also said want) that they �wanted� something of him or
sumthing,

116
P: hmnn?
hmnn?

117
S: ze wouden hem in elkaar slaan ofzo:,
they wanted to beat him up or sumthi:n,

118 P: en waarom?=

and why?=

119
S: =manilo had ruzie met hem geloof ik,
=manilo had had an argument with him I think,

120 P: hmnn mnn, (0.4)

hmnn mnn, (0.4)

121
S: voor zover ik weet,
as far as i know,

122
maarja.
but yeah.

123
ik weet niet,
I don’t know,

124
manilo had volgens mij ruzie met hem,
manilo had an argument with him I think,

125 dat was het ja.

that was it yeah.

126
P: ;hmnn. ;hmnn.
127 S: [of gavon.

[or gavon.

128
P: [nnee.
[nno.

129 �nee�.
�no�.
130
manilo zegt dat jullie die ipod wilde stelen van hem.
manilo said that you ((PLURAL)) wanted to steal the ipod from him.

131
S: "ik vond het sowieso al geen goed idee, "I didn’t think it was a good idea anyhow,
132
ik zei ze al,
I already told em,

133
laat hem.
leave him.

In the example above we see another clear example of steering the suspect’s story. The officer is seeking an answer to whythe suspect and his friends asked the victim to step inside the garage. After several why’s (lines 114 and 118) and continuersthat show that the officer wants to hear more (lines 116, 120 and 126), the suspect keeps providing more information. Notonly does the officer steer the suspect in a particular direction, the suspect also orients to this supervision and provides more




details. It is not surprising that the suspect provides these additional details. Within this institutionalized turn-taking sys-tem, it takes quite some interactional effort to provide non-preferred second responses. On top of that, the suspect is only14 years old.

The officer does not agree with the suspect’s version of events, as can be seen in lines 128 and 129 when the officer ini-tiates a ‘no’ as a story response in overlap with the suspect. The police officer provides an alternative version of the events inline 130. The suspect then implicitly confirms that that was their intention, by stating that he didn’t think that it was a goodidea anyhow (line 131). When the suspect finally (implicitly) admits that they pulled the victim into the garage with theintention of stealing the iPod, the officer begins typing (not shown here). By doing this, the officer demonstrates that the storyis now ready to be typed up.

In this interrogation the officer soon interrupted Byron’s story after he asked to tell what happened. The officer steeredthe suspect in a particular direction, not only by interrupting the suspect’s initial story, but also by asking further specificquestions, assessing the suspect’s answers and suggesting another version of events. By agreeing to this co-constructed ver-sion, the suspect implicitly admits intent.

4.2.2. Written storyBelow is the text of the case-related phase of the interrogation:

Example 8 (PR-int3):

Wij werden aangehouden omdat wij ervan verdacht werden ons schuldig te hebben gemaakt aan

straatroof.

U vraagt mij wat ik hierover wil verklaren.

Ik verklaar U, dat ik gisteren middag samen met Gavon en Manilo in de straat van Manilo was. Terwijl

wij op straat waren, zagen wij Mervellino. Ik weet niet wie Mervellino geroepen heeft. Ik ben het in

ieder geval niet geweest. Ik zag dat Mervellino naar ons toe kwam. Toen Mervellino bij ons was, zag

ik, dat hij een koptelefoon van een om zijn hals had. We spraken met Mervellino en vroegen waar hij

vandaan kwam. Ik hoorde dat Mervellino zei, dat hij van stage kwam en naar huis ging. Ik weet niet

meer hoe het gesprek verder verlopen is, maar opeens stonden wij in box gang bij de woning van Manilo

waren. Mervellino stond ook in de boxgang. Toen Mervellino weg wilde, hebben wij die toegangsdeur

dicht gehouden. . .

We were arrested because we were suspected of being guilty of street robbery.

You ask me what I want to declare about this.I state to you, that I yesterday afternoon together with Gavon and Manilo was in Manilo’s street.

While we were on the street, we saw Mervelinio. I don’t know who called Mervelinio. In any case, it

wasn’t me. I saw that Mervelinio came towards us. When Mervelinio came to us, I saw, that he had a

headset of aaaround his neck. We spoke with Mervelinio and asked him where he came from. I heard that

Mervelinio said, that he came from his internship and was going home. I don’t remember how the

conversation continued, but all of a sudden we were in the garage hall way at the house of Manilo.

Mervellino was also in the garage hall way. When Mervelinio wanted to leave, we held the access door

closed. . .

a Typing and spelling errors have been translated as such. This typing error suggests that earlier the officer had written up ‘‘headset of an iPod’’ but thenmost likely removed ‘‘of an iPod’’ when the suspect told him otherwise. In the interrogation (not shown here), the suspect at some point claims that he hadspecifically only seen the headphones and not the iPod on the victim.

Recall that when the officer elicited the story, the suspect began his story by telling the officer that he was in the garagewith his friends where he was ‘just sitting a bit chilling’ (Example 4). The officer then elicited and suggested a new beginningstarting from being on the street where they saw the victim walking. It is precisely this beginning that is also the beginningof the written story. In other words, the officer decides on the beginning. What is important in this interrogation is whetheror not the suspects saw that the victim had an iPod on him. If this was the case, the suspects can be charged with an inten-tional robbery. Whether or not the suspect saw that the victim had an iPod (or headphones) would have occurred before thevictim was in the garage. The officer’s version of the story therefore needs to begin before the participants arrived in thegarage.

Contrary to the ‘‘free’’ story, we see here that most of the changes to the story already occur during the interaction.Throughout the interaction, the suspect is interrupted and evaluated and thereby supervised to tell the details of the storythat the officer seeks. Furthermore, the officer explicitly seeks information about the complicating action.

In the written text we see additional changes that were made in the process of transforming talk to text. For example, thewritten version begins with the very formal statement ‘I state to you’, which the suspect never uttered. The statement be-comes a formal, institutional piece of writing in which it appears as if the suspect volunteered an official statement. Addi-tionally, it looks as if the suspect volunteered the entire story in the police record. However, what really happened is that the




suspect started telling a story about what happened, but was immediately interrupted by the police officer who steered himinto a certain storytelling direction. This cannot be seen when solely looking at the written product.

4.3. Imposed story

In this section I will use one interrogation to demonstrate that not all suspects provide elaborate stories about the eventsthat occurred. This suspect, Sunny, is interrogated about stealing five euro’s from someone else’s pocket. The suspect doesnot want to tell what happened. The officer tells how the event took place and this is minimally confirmed by the suspect.It is the officer’s story that appears in the police record.

4.3.1. Soliciting and imposing a storyPrevious to this interaction, the officer mentioned the name of the victim and that the case concerns five euro’s. The offi-

cer then begins with a story solicitation. After the officer elicits the story in lines 2–4 the suspect replies ‘no’ in line 5. In thisinterrogation there is a second officer present (P2) who types while P1 is interrogating the suspect.


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ohkee? (1)

ohkay? (1)

2
kun je zelf vertellen wat er gebeurd is,
can you tell yourself what has happened,

3 die a- die middag,

that n- that evening,

4
die avond,
that evening,

5
S: nee.
no.

6
P1: nee?
no?

7
(3)
8
P2: ((types throughout interaction))
9
P1: volgens john eh was jij met eh, (1)
according to john eh you were with eh, (1)

10 nog een aantal jongens,

a few other guys,

11
waaronder ook marvinio,
also including marvinio,

12
(1)
13
winkelcentrum zwaan;hof. shopping centre zwaan;hof.
14 in diemenzuid.

in diemenzuid.

15
(2)
16
daareh daar was een jongen, (1)
there eh was a boy, (1)

17 die werd eerst door (.) marvinio aangesproken,

who was first talked to by (.) marvinio,

((10 lines ommitted))

28
je gaat (.) met je hand in zijn jaszak. you go (.) with your hand in his jacket
pocket.




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30
eeeh,
eeeh,

31
en dan, (0.5)
and then, (0.5)

32 wordt er vijf euro uitgehaald,

five euros is taken out,

33
en zijn sleutels.
and his keys.

((8 lines ommitted))

42 toen is die vader van die jongen,

then the father of the boy,

43
bij jou aan de deur geweest.
came to your door.

44
en heb je hem die vijf euro teruggegeven. (1)
and you gave him the five euro back. (1)

45
klopt he?
that’s right eh?

46
S: (�ja�) (�yes�)
After this negative and non-preferred (Pomerantz, 1984) answer to the story elicitation in line 5, the officer repeats therejection with questioning intonation. The suspect does not take the next slot and a distinctly long pause follows (lines 6–7).The interrogating officer (P1) continues his turn in line 9 and begins summarizing the case, or, in other words, the officerbegins telling the story according to the victim report. The officer’s story comprises of 31 intonation units in which severalfacts are read out loud. At the very end, in line 45, the officer suggests ‘that’s right eh’, to which the suspect conforms. Such ayes/no interrogative provides an extremely limited choice for responding, ‘exploit[ing] the agenda-setting and subsequentconduct constraining potential of initiating a course of action’ (Raymond, 2006: 119). Raymond (2003) has also shown thattype-conforming responses to yes/no interrogatives are much more common than non-conforming responses. It is ambigu-ous whether the suspect agrees to all the facts just stated by the officer or solely to the last fact. The typing officer (P2) treatshis answer as a confirmation of all facts as can be seen in the written story.

4.3.2. Written storyEven without the suspect telling his version of events, the officer is still able to create a story on paper. This shows us that

writing up a version of the events is one of the main goals of the police record.Example 10 (PR-int10)

U vertelt mij dat u mij wenst te horen over een beroving op 6 februari van 5 euro op Zwanenhof in

Diemen-Zuid. Da aangever heet John. U vraagt mij of ik daar over wat wil vertellen.

Nee dat wil ik niet.

U leest mij uit de aangifte voor de dat aangever wordt ingesloten door een groep, dat ik met zijn hand

in zijn zak heb gezeten. Daar 5 euro uit heb gehaald en dat zijn vader een dag later het geld heeft

opgehaald. Dat klopt.

You tell me that you wish to interrogate me about a robbery of 5 euro’s on February 6th in Zwanehof in

Diemen-Zuid. Tha victim is called John. You ask me if I want to tell something about that. No I don’t

want to.

You read to me from the victim report that the victim is closed in by a group, that I was in his pocket

with his hand. Took five euro’s out and that his father collected the money a day later. That’s right.

Even without the suspect giving any information at all, this police record still includes the information that officers oftenelicit: time, location, characters involved and whether or not the events that the police believe occurred are confirmed by thesuspect. In fact, this second paragraph is a very efficient form of storytelling. A past experience is told by matching verbal




clauses with a sequence of events (see the definition given by Labov and Waletzky as described in Section 2.1). Furthermore,there is an orientation, complicating action and a resolution. This illustrates the power of the institutional demands of thewritten police record.

Although the suspect provided minimal responses, the written version is very similar to the spoken interaction. The offi-cer’s questions are included in the text and therefore demonstrate that the suspect did not voluntarily tell a story. Further-more, the structure of the interrogation remains the same because of the question–answer style format used in the writtendocument (also see van Charldorp, 2011; van Charldorp and Schellingen, in press). The biggest change, or rather ambiguity,can be seen in the second paragraph. Here we can distinguish four different actions: (1) the victim is closed in by a group; (2)I was in his pocket with his hand; (3) I took out five euro’s; and (4) a day later his father collected the money. The ‘that’s right’answer is noted on paper as a confirmation to all four actions. As noted in the interaction, the officer has listed these fouractions one after the other and the suspect provides a ‘yes’ response only after the fourth action. Even though the answeris ambiguous in the text, it was also ambiguous in the spoken interaction. The result of this type of story solicitation,(non) storytelling and writing up of the story, is that the original interaction is relatively visible in this written document.

5. Conclusion: What happened?

In the analyses we have seen three ways in which stories are elicited, told and co-constructed in the interrogation room.First, we have seen how the officer provides room for a ‘‘free’’ story. Through acknowledgements and continuers, the officerorients to a longer turn at talk from the suspect. The suspect tells the story in a typical narrative manner with an orientation,complication, evaluation, and resolution. Only after the suspect completes his story does the officer start asking more specificquestions. Although the ‘‘free’’ story forms the basis for the written story, several changes take place when the story is writ-ten up. In the end we saw that the police record is written as if entirely volunteered by the suspect, it becomes a more formaland factual story and it becomes more intentional through recontextualised questions and a different story structure.

Secondly, we saw that not all officers provide the suspect with a longer turn at talk. We saw how the officer supervisedthe suspect’s story by asking to start over and by asking more specific questions in overlap with the suspect’s utterances. Thisreconstructed story was later written up in the record in monologue format as answers to recontextualised questions.Although the recontextualisation phrases give us some insight into what questions were asked that elicited these writtenanswers, many questions have been left out. Furthermore, the way the answers were evaluated and the story was con-structed and steered throughout the interrogation cannot be seen from looking at the written document.

Thirdly, we saw that when the suspect refuses to tell a story, the officer tells the story and the suspect may or may notacknowledge the statements comprising the story. This is then written up by using recontextualisation phrases. Thesephrases, although written from the perspective of the suspect, do indicate what questions the officer asked. The suspect’sfew words in the record are very similar to his words spoken during the interrogation.

In the process of transforming a spoken story to a written story in the police record format, we have seen several trans-formations. Through further questioning, interrupting or by telling the story themselves, officers adhere to their own struc-ture and chronology of how they make the events understandable. Officers construct or reconstruct stories for which theyseek details concerning people involved, time and location: officers make the stories recordable, institutional and judiciallyrelevant. In this process they use previous knowledge from victim reports or other interrogations to co-construct the versionof events. Although Lerner (1992) suggests that stories in everyday interaction are also often co-constructed, he shows thatco-constructors employ ‘‘shared knowledge’’ because co-constructors were often both/all present when the event occurred.In the police interrogation setting, only the suspect was (supposedly) present when the events occurred. Co-construction inthe interrogation room is based on institutional previous knowledge as well as institutional demands.

The institutional demands are also visible in the written version of the stories. Here, the ordinariness of the suspects’ ver-sion of events is often left out. Additionally, the temporal order of the events has been adapted to a coherent story wherefacts regarding time, location and direction are included in detail. Overall, the written story is a much more factual, detailed,precise and intentional story on paper constructed according to the officer’s perspective. The majority of the elicitation ques-tions, negotiation process and steering of the story that occurs throughout the interrogation or while the officer is typing upthe story is not shown in the record. What the analyses have shown is that the written stories come about in various ways.The shaping of a suspect’s story therefore already begins in the interrogation room, either in interaction or when the story iswritten up, depending on what type of story is solicited and told.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), dossier number PR-05-01.

Appendix A. Transcription key

Part I of these transcription conventions is based on Mazeland (2003) and Jefferson (2004). Part II below consists of myown additions in order to transcribe the typing sounds:




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ease cite this articlettp://dx.doi.org/10.10

(1,5)
a silence indicated in seconds (.) a silence shorter than 0,2 seconds dealers= there is no noticeable silence between two sequentially following =because speaker’s turns or between two intonation units produced by the same speaker [overlap two conversational partners are speaking in overlap with each other [of talk this can occur at the beginning of two new turns, or during a turn . , ? falling (.), slightly rising (,) and rising (?) intonation contour at the end of an intonation unit " ; rising (") and falling (;) tone _ the underlined syllable or sound is stressed e::h the colon indicates that the previous vowel or consonant is noticeably longer than normal for this
particular speaker
LOUD the word or letters in capitals are spoken relatively loud �soft� the words or letters within the degree signs are spoken relatively soft brea- the speaker holds back and breaks off the production of a word or part thereof abruptly > the text that follows is spoken relatively fast (closing symbol: <) < the text that follows is spoken relatively slow (closing symbol: >) ((coughs)) characterization of a non-verbal activity or any other significant happening ((coughs, cries, types)) ( ) speaker says something that the transcriber cannot (fully) understand
Part II
x individual keystroke X loud keystroke �x� soft keystroke xxx continuous typing x x x keystrokes with brief pauses between each keystroke (can indicate that a backspace key is used to
edit the text)
((types 13 sec)) hearable typing for 13 seconds That is correct. text in the police record
References

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"What happened?": from talk to text in police interrogations