Sedat Mulayim

Interpreter linguistic intervention in the strategies employed by police in investigative interviews

Police interviews are high-stakes activities that bear legal consequences when the cases move to court proceedings. A wide range of literature exists on police interviewing strategies aiming to obtain complete information from the interviewee; however, this literature focuses primarily on monolingual settings only. This paper reports on an empirical study examining the word choices made by interpreters of 11 selected languages in three scripted police interview excerpts. The study found that considered verbal strategies deliberately employed by police in investigative interviewing may be interfered with by the interpreter in a bilingual setting. The authors discuss the implications of such linguistic intervention for police interview outcomes and propose improvements for the training of interpreters and police.

Police Investigative Interviews and Interpreting: Context, Challenges, and Strategies

Police interviews with suspects and witnesses provide some of the most significant evidence in criminal investigations. Frequently challenging, they require special training and skills. This interaction process is further complicated when the suspect or witness does not speak the same language as the interviewer. A professional reference that can be used in police training or in any venue where an interpreter is used, Police Investigative Interviews and Interpreting: Context, Challenges, and Strategies provides solutions for the range of interview demands found in todays multilingual environments. Topics include: What interpreting is, the skills required, and the role of interpreters in any job context Investigative interviewing in law enforcement Concerns about interpreter intervention and its impact on interview outcomes The value of word-based over meaning-based interpretation in police and legal contexts Nonlinguistic factors that can have an impact on the interpreting process The book explores the multi-faceted dynamics of conducting investigative interviews via interpreters and examines current investigative interviewing paradigms. It offers strategies to help interpreters and law enforcement officers and provides examples of interpreted interview excerpts to enable understanding. Although the subject matter and the examples in this book are largely limited to police interview settings, the underlying rationale applies to other professional areas that rely on interviews to collect information, including customs procedures, employer-employee interviews, and insurance claim investigations. This book is part of the CRC Press Advances in Police Theory and Practice Series.

Ethics for Police Translators and Interpreters

This book examines the major theoretical foundations of ethics, before zooming in on definitions of professional practice and applied professional ethics, as distinct from private morals, in general and then focusing on professional ethics for translators and interpreters in police and legal settings. The book concludes with a chapter that offers a model for ethical decision making in the profession.

Remarks by Commentating Editors

This issue of PPR provides a locus for five high-quality articles and two book reviews, which touch on organizational fairness and staff retention in police forces, gaps in research approaches in policing and practices, and publications on sexual trafficking and sexual assault crimes in the US. Issues around organizational fairness and inequities in police institutions impact on job satisfaction and retention of staff. This is the central contention of the first article contributed by Loene Howes and Jane Goodman-Delahunty entitled Career decisions by Australian police officers: a cross-section of perspectives on entering, staying in and leaving policing careers. With good numbers of participants, including both serving and former police officers, and by using a free-response questionnaire, the authors were able to conduct a thematic analysis of the data collected in order to explore factors affecting the respondents’ decision to stay in or leave the force. Three main factors identified for higher police retention are authenticity (in their personal choice to join the force; their subsequent perceived support from the community; and their feeling of agency and belonging as a consequence of good organizational management), balance (of income, job security and work-life balance) and challenge (from opportunities and the enjoyment these engender). This is followed by the second article, Paul Reynolds and Jeremiah Hicks’s qualitative study ‘There is no justice in a police department’: a phenomenological study of police experiences. Despite the small number of participants, the study taps into the perceptions and lived experiences of organizational unfairness and inequalities reported by participant police officers. The authors should be congratulated for this first effort in providing an in-depth account and analysis. The focal concern of this article is powerfully summarized in the words of one of the participant police officers: ‘...how is the police department going to build trust, enforce rules and laws impartially in the community if they can’t even do it in their own backyard?’ All professions rely on robust research and solid scholarship to advance the profession as a whole in order to respond to the changing needs of the profession and society. Policing is no exception. The following two articles in this issue make a valuable contribution to this specific topic. Alex Luscombe and Kevin Walby examine the significance of Access To Information (ATI) requests in Canada in obtaining data which would otherwise remain out of reach for researchers. The authors find that efforts to access data through ATIs are in itself a process that provides a valuable insight into police processes in data handling. The wider implication of ATI intersects the politics of information, issues of government accountability, and quests for justice, all of which are important issues in social scientific research. On the other hand, Michael Jenkins, through a meta-analysis of 88 empirical studies of US police, reports on the grant-dependent, local nature of police research and highlights the low numbers of practitioners working as lead researchers in the pool of studies covered. He also identifies the bias in