Police interrogation in Brazil: institutional talk permeated by traces of spontaneous conversation

Authors

  • Daniela Negraes Pinheiro Andrade
  • Ana Cristina Ostermann

Abstract

The article discusses how police interrogations in a Brazilian police station are constituted and what characteristics make them different from police interrogations investigated in other cultural contexts. We take as bases for comparison studies of police interrogation conducted by Shuy (1998), in the USA, by Komter (2003), in the Netherlands, and by Heydon (2005), in Australia. Whereas the police interrogations in Australia, USA and the Netherlands are similar in the way they are conducted (avoidance of expressions of sympathy, affiliation or disaffiliation with the deponents, use of technical jargon throughout the interrogation, among others), the Brazilian police interrogations in the context investigated diverge from all of those in several aspects. The main phenomena responsible for such dissonance are: (1) use of irony, (2) creation of hypotheses without making use of metalanguage, and (3) use of evaluations about situations concerning the crime, topics mentioned by the deponent, and the deponent himself/ herself. The interrogations conducted by the Brazilian police officers are also permeated by laughter, less caution with regards to maintaining a position of neutrality, affiliation and disaffiliation by the officers, options that seem to give characteristics of spontaneous conversations to those interactions.

Key words: police interrogation, institutional interaction, spontaneous conversation.

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Published

2021-05-27

How to Cite

Andrade, D. N. P., & Ostermann, A. C. (2021). Police interrogation in Brazil: institutional talk permeated by traces of spontaneous conversation. Calidoscópio, 5(2), 92–104. Retrieved from https://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/calidoscopio/article/view/5630

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2007): May/August

Section

Articles

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