Mardi Kidwell

‘Calm down!’: the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police

Gaze is a central mechanism for the entry into and coordination of face-to-face interaction. As such, persistent and sustained gaze withdrawal may indicate significant troubles in an interaction. This article examines how two police officers, in seeking to calm a hysterical woman whose grandson has been shot, treat her refusal to gaze at them as a central component of her persisting hysteria. Toward the end of getting the woman to calm down, one officer seeks her return gaze using embedded and exposed methods of gaze pursuit. These methods work on a continuum in which, at one end, a turn at talk can be preserved as the main activity, while at the other end, the main activity becomes remedying the interactional trouble. These methods address different interactional relevancies having to do with 1) being a listener to a speaker, 2) being a recipient of a directive action, and 3) a basic obligation to comport oneself as at least minimally aware and responsive when targeted by the actions of co-present others.

'Let me tell you about myself': A method for suppressing subject talk in a 'soft accusation' interrogation

This article describes interactional features of an interrogation method that is used by law enforcement and private security companies in the US known as the ‘soft accusation’ method. We demonstrate how the method, in contrast to the more common ‘story solicitation’ method, makes use of a ‘telling about oneself ’ activity to actually suppress a subject’s talk by setting up and maintaining an exceptionally long turn by the interrogator. This turn not only constrains subjects’ speaking contributions to the issuing of continuers and acknowledgments, and, as such, their opportunities to challenge or resist, but, based as it is on ‘telling about oneself ’, re-organizes the knowledge differential to one in which it is the interrogator rather than the subject who has primary epistemic rights of disclosure. We provide an overview of interactional problems associated with the story solicitation method and then consider how the soft accusation method is designed to counter them, particularly via practices of informing and describing that are associated with the activity of ‘telling about oneself ’. As we show, these practices make use of techniques of elaboration that provide a resource for turn expansion, as well as for seamless topical movement that works to positively align the subject to the interrogator’s talk and, thus, to smooth the interactional pathway to the subject’s admission of guilt.

Early Alignment in Police Traffic Stops

ABSTRACT This article examines the “reason for the stop” in police traffic stops as an important site of alignment that connects pre-beginning events to ratified interaction. Getting citizens on board with the business of what is an incipiently coercive encounter is important police work, especially in the early moments of interaction but later in the interaction as well. As I demonstrate, officers’ and citizens’ orientations to pre-beginning events, and how these are displayed with respect to the reason for the stop, serve as an omnirelevant resource for alignment, and sometimes contestation, throughout the course of the encounter. Data are in American English.

Making an impression in traffic stops: Citizens’ volunteered accounts in two positions:

When citizens are pulled over by police for traffic violations, they often volunteer accounts for their driving conduct. These accounts convey important character qualities about the citizen, as well as exigencies (e.g. they are late) that motivate officer response. We use the method of conversation analysis to show that where a citizen positions an account in the course of an encounter is subject to different interactional-organizational constraints, which in turn afford citizens different resources for self-presentation. We also show that officers are sensitive to citizens’ accounts and respond to them in differentiated ways. In addition to being a resource for self-presentation, citizens’ volunteered accounts are a resource for motivating and shaping police action.