"Do you know? Do you remember?": Information Safeguarding in Police Interrogations through the (Com)Position of Questions and Answers

Abstract This paper analyzes questions and answers - a type of sequence that is constitutive of police interrogations. By means of Multimodal Conversation Analysis, it investigates how the safeguarding of information concerning crimes unfolds in police interrogations. A fine-grained sequential and multimodal analysis of the audio and/or video recorded interrogations reveals that the safeguarding of information is accomplished not only by the interrogated suspects in their responsive actions, but also ensued by the police officers by means of their question design. Interrogated suspects safeguard facts about crimes by resisting in providing the information requested in responsive turns that do not answer but that instead claim lack of knowledge, remembrance or awareness. Police officers, on the other hand, afford and initiate suspects’ information safeguarding by designing questions with verbs as to know and to remember. Such question design vouchsafes suspects to negate knowledge and remembrance of the requested information while aligning with the preference of the question format and presenting no resistance.