Counter-Denunciations : How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Counter-Denunciations : How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes © The Author(s) 2023 Published version Ferraz de Almeida, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations : How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37(1), 119-137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10060-9 2024 Vol.:(0123456789) Int J Semiot Law https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10060-9 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice Interviews forLow‑Level Crimes FabioFerrazdeAlmeida1 Accepted: 25 September 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract This article explores the ways in which suspects attempt to make putative victims/complainants at least partially responsible for the incidents for which they are investigated, transforming themselves into the victim and the other into the perpetrator. Drawing upon conversation analysis, I examine audio-recorded police interviews for low-level crimes in England and in which suspects have constructed what I refer as counter-denunciations. I argue that suspects accomplish these counter-denunciations through discursive practices that involve, for example (a) contrasting the complainant’s actions with their own innocent conduct; (b) historicizing the event being investigated; and (c) discrediting the complainant’s character—stigmatizing. These practices have in common the suspects’ reliance on the relational and contextual character of the categories ‘offender’ and ‘victim’. Keywords Police interviews· Criminal offences· Suspects· Counter-denunciation· Defensive strategies· Victim-blaming· Conversation analysis 1 Introduction People arrested on suspicion of having committed a criminal offence are generally interviewed by the police about the circumstances of and their involvement in the alleged offence, before a decision can be made whether to prosecute the suspect, and if so on what charge (i.e., for what formal and specific * Fabio Ferraz de Almeida f[email protected]; f.fer[email protected] 1 University ofJyväskylä, Jyväkylä, Finland F.Ferraz de Almeida 1 3 crime, according to the relevant legal code). This applies to the legal system in England and Wales—the system that is the context and focus of this study—and also in very many jurisdictions worldwide [1–3]. At any rate, in the English criminal legal system, before formally charging a suspect, police question suspects about the incident—about what happened and what led up to the incident, about the suspect’s conduct and their frame of mind; in other words, they interview the suspect about whatever might be relevant to discovering, from the suspects account, whether their conduct was such as to support bringing a criminal charge, and if so, what charge should be brought against the suspect. During this period of police questioning, suspects adopt what can generally be regarded as defensive strategies, which can include outright denials, e.g. through claims of mistaken identity, claims to have been elsewhere, or that whilst they were present and witnessed what happened, they were merely bystanders; justifications for their conduct, including denials that their conduct was wrong, for instance that they acted in self-defense; or they may excuse their conduct, for instance having acted under duress or when suffering from a mental disorder. Even though these distinctions between denials, justification and excuses [4] seem clearly to differentiate legal categories of defense, they may not capture precisely how suspects respond to officers’ questions, and their discursive defense strategies in answering these questions in police interviews. For example, suspects may employ a defensive strategy in which they attempt to mitigate or shift the blame on themselves by blaming the other—by denouncing the complainant or putative victim, as in this case in which a suspect is being questioned about an incident for which he has been arrested: 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice… F.Ferraz de Almeida 1 3 The suspect in this case had been arrested for criminal damage. His initial response to the accusation was simply to explicitly deny having damaged his neighbour’s vehicle (not shown here). However, when asked by the interviewing police officer (PO1) about the circumstances of the event, the suspect builds a narrative in which the putative victim is depicted as the one who initiated the incident (lines 19–20). Following that, the suspect constructs a version that involved historicizing the single episode (line 42) and attributing a ‘spoiled identity’ to the victim (line 50), in addition to listing a series of episodes of misconduct on the part of his neighbour (lines 54–71). The complainant, i.e., the putative victim, had denounced the suspect to the police, alleging that he (the suspect) had damaged his car. The suspect counters this allegation by constructing a version of events in which he, the one being questioned on suspicion of committing an offence, is actually the victim of the complainant’s (and his partner’s) abusive conduct. The extract above illustrates some of the multiple ways through which a suspect may achieve what we are referring to as a counter-denunciation, a discursive defensive strategy sometimes used by those accused of wrongdoing ‘to undermine the discrediting implications of the accusation by attacking the actions, motives and/or character of one’s accusers’ ([5], p. 156). In other words, suspects can defend themselves against an accusation by blaming the putative victims for the incident and then making them either wholly or at least partially responsible for ‘what happened’. Although there has been research on the ways through which suspects respond to the accusations that are made against them and defend themselves in police interviews and interrogations [6–8], language and discourse studies of counter-denunciations have been rather restricted to the analysis of research interview material conducted with (former) offenders, in cases concerning domestic violence and rape, in which the strategy is often referred as ‘blaming the victim’ or ‘victim-blaming’ [9, 10]. In this paper, I will adopt the term counter-denunciation in order to avoid the association that ‘blaming the victim’ often has to sexual crimes; counter-denunciation is more generic and hence more applicable to the data analysed here, police interviews with suspects in crimes involving low tariff offences, particularly in the context of neighbours’ disputes. In this sense, I borrow the term from Emerson [5], who identified counter-denunciations as a general defensive strategy used by alleged young offenders in juvenile courtrooms. The author formulates a definition for that defensive strategy and presents a series of illustrative examples to discuss its use in the process of establishing the moral character of young offenders. The study nonetheless did not to explore the linguistic resources mobilized by participants for constructing this particular defensive strategy in talk-in-interaction. I argue that counter-denunciations are achieved through a variety of discursive practices, whether employed individually or in combination. I propose to examine how suspects manage and construct these counter-denunciations in police investigative interviews, that is, the ways through which suspects defend themselves through denouncing the other, i.e., the accuser/complainant/putative victim. I argue that these practices involve, for example: (a) contrasting the complainant’s actions with their own innocent conduct; (b) historicizing the event being investigated; and (c) discrediting the complainant’s character—stigmatizing. In the conclusion, I suggest that these 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice… discursive practices can be used individually or in combination, and discuss the limitations associated to the nature of the cases in my data set. 2 Data andMethods This research draws upon audio-recordings of 27 police investigative interviews with suspects in a police station in England, produced as a standard police procedure. They were originally collected by other researchers as part of a project on neighbour disputes [11, 12]. All names and other identifying information were pseudonymised at source. For this paper, I have identified episodes of counter-denunciations in four interviews and the extracts presented here were selected because they best illustrate the multiple ways through which this defensive strategy is accomplished, and the discursive and interactional resources mobilized in each practice1. These extracts were transcribed according to the conventions widely used in conversation analysis (henceforth CA) [13]. The analysis draws upon CA for uncovering the ways in which suspects rely on these practices for producing counter-denunciations, and thereby make visible the accountability of descriptions and social actions associated with this phenomenon in social interaction ([14], p. 75). The recordings I analyse involve disputes between neighbours and are from cases in which the suspects have been arrested in connection with their involvement in relatively minor (low tariff) offences, ranging from threatening behaviour and harassment to criminal damage and assault. Although these are not the remarkable and dramatic cases featured in newspapers and television documentaries, they are hugely relevant to the construction of law-in-action in our society as they represent the most ordinary and mundane work in the context of the criminal justice system in England.2 In what follows, I will present and analyse in detail each of the three discursive practices through which suspects accomplish counter-denunciations. For reasons of space, I will begin the analytical sections by referring to the case presented in the introduction, followed by one or two examples to illustrate each particular practice. 3 Contrasting theComplainant’s Culpability withSelf’s Innocence The case presented in the introduction offers a comprehensive view of counterdenunciations. It reveals a series of descriptive practices through which suspects denounce their complainants and thereby attempt to shift away from themselves or mitigate blame for the original criminal accusation. One of these practices is visible in the initial part of the extract, in which the suspect constructs a narrative 1 All extracts that have been included in this article come from my PhD thesis. 2 For the latest statistics on type and volume of crimes received and processed through the criminal system from April to June 2022 in England and Wales, see https:// www. gov. uk/ gover nment/ stati stics/ crimi nalcourtstati sticsquart erlyapriltojune2022. F.Ferraz de Almeida 1 3 through which he exhibits his own innocence, before contrasting it with the complainant’s behaviour. When invited to talk about his circumstances of events in the previous night, the suspect builds a description of a series of activities he was involved prior to the incident. He had arrived home with his family, after attending a football match, and had noticed a lot of noise coming from outside his house. When the suspect initially introduces the problematic event in line 13 and repeats it in lines 17–18, (“There was a lot of noise going off outside”), he does so without revealing the source or the agent responsible for this first malicious action. It is only after making clear that he acted as an innocent and reasonable person, i.e., a person who had just come home with his family (line 12) and who, after being disturbed by a lot of noise, went to check what was happening outside (line 18), that he finally refers to the potential offender. This description sets the scene for the escalation of the problematic event (“and I had some abuse out of the window”, line 19), the responsibility for which is attributed to his neighbours (“from Ted (1.2) and his girlfriend”, lines 19–20). In his initial account, the suspect establishes a contrast between his own innocent conduct, which is conveyed by the ordinariness of the scene depicted, and the complainant’s culpable behaviour, indicated especially by the rupture of that ordinariness, i.e., the abuse from his neighbours, which seemed to have come unexpectedly and for no apparent reason. 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice… A similar practice is also visible in the following extract, referring to a case in which the suspect and his wife were arrested for having threatened and abused their next-door neighbour. The sequence below occurred in the early phase of the interview. The police officer had introduced the interview and cautioned the suspect and then started asking questions about what happened that particular night, soliciting his side of the story. i.e., from the perspective of the accused. The suspect’s initial account conveys a contrast between the completely innocent behaviour of him and his family and the reprehensible conduct of the complainant, who unexpectedly and hence without a reasonable motive, appears and breaks the domestic orderly scene. The suspect depicts himself as being involved in an innocent ordinary scene in which he and his family members engage in activities that are often easily accounted for in terms of nothing special was happening; it is just a domestic scene in which an ordinary man is watching a football match on the TV with his family. In this way, the suspect is ‘doing being ordinary’, that is, he is constructing a description of his life and events in such a way that it highlights their mundane, unremarkable and unproblematic features ([15], pp. 413–429). The work to design an innocent, ordinary scene begins with the suspect’s statement “we’re all watching football” (lines 10–11) but it is the self-repair that comes F.Ferraz de Almeida 1 3 subsequently that uncovers the relevance of the sense of the ordinariness that the suspect is conveying through his description. After the cut-off (“It-”, which is presumably referring to ‘football’) and the 0.6s pause in line 11, we see a change from “we’re all” (line 10) to “my wife (.) <myself and my daughter> i:n—in my hou:se” (lines 11–12). The self-repair exposes the suspect’s effort to design his narrative and convey more effectively [16], in this case, his innocence. The insertion, which includes the family members, is a qualified version of the previous description, i.e. ‘we all’. The importance of this insertion is that by detailing who was there and where, it shows that it is ‘a family in their house’, doing nothing but watching TV, which enhances the sense the suspect is designing his turn to make it clear the ordinariness and the family-character of the scene. By examining the design of this turn, one can see how the suspect takes the trouble to display that ‘we’ is a family unit, not just a ‘group of people’. The innocent and ordinary behaviour of the suspect and his family is then contrasted with what his neighbours were doing and how their conduct disrupted this ordinary scene. The rupture of the ordinary (innocent) and the emergence of the extraordinary (misconduct) is conveyed for example by the emphasis the suspect puts on the words that intensify the problem, i.e., the intensifying expression ‘a lot’ and the lexical choice in ‘banging’ (line 13). Prior to that point in his description, due to the use of impersonal or agentless constructions such as ‘there was’ (line 13) or ‘going on’ (lines 13) it is not possible to identify who was the individual doing the ‘banging’, although the suspect locates the problematical action as coming ‘from next door’ (line 13). The agency of the problematic action becomes clear when the suspect describes the ‘banging’ as done by a woman (‘she’, line 16), in that case, his neighbour, who had been mentioned by the officer previously in the interview. The extract shows that part of the suspect’s work for constructing the other’s culpability—and completing a counter-denunciation—involves also describing what they themselves were doing in order to promote a version in which they mitigate their responsibility for what happened. In the case mentioned above, the suspect uses the phrase “having a few drinks tonight (0.2) watching football” to characterize what he was doing when the victim started to make all the noise. He seems then to anticipate a possible version sustained by the victim: that he was drunk and that generates credibility to a story in which he threatened her. As a way to avoid that, he designs this part of his account using a construction which normalised his conduct. ‘A few’ are not many or too many; having drinks is not being drunk. The same effort is visible when he describes his conduct after hearing the ‘banging’ as ‘I went round to ask her to keep it down’ (lines 22–23). In his version, although the neighbour was performing a wrongful act, he kept control of himself and responded in a manner that was not hostile nor intended to escalate the initial dispute. He did not go there to ‘shut the music off’ or to ‘order them to stop the banging’. In other words, he did not go there to cause trouble, even after being disturbed by the neighbour and the loud noise coming from next-door. His description conveys a rather rational and sensible approach to the problem, which helps him to portray himself as the actual victim, not the offender. By setting the scene and describing an ordinary background for an extraordinary event [17], the suspect contrasts his self-innocent conduct with the other-malicious behaviour, and promotes a version in which his alleged wrongful act 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice… Despite having denied committed any crime (lines 1–2), when asked by the interviewing police officer (PO1) if he had anything to add, the suspect makes a rather clear and forceful counter-denunciation, putting on record (“for the benefit of the court”, line 4) that the complainant, a neighbour who was accusing him of criminal damage, is himself a drug addict and alcoholic, and had attempted to rob him (lines 4–6). The suspect designs his turn by juxtaposing these characterological formulations [28] or dispositional categories (“heroin and crack addict”) with a description that conveys what the complainant was doing (“trying to get money off me”). In this sense, the dispositional categories’ work is twofold: they discredit the complainant’s character by attributing to him all the negative characteristics and behaviour commonly associated with heroin and crack addicts (spoiled identity), while implying a malicious motive to his attempt to get money off the suspect [8]. In both cases, suspects rely on categorial work to denounce the complainants, who are also their neighbours, and achieve a counter-denunciation. Furthermore, the categorization sets the ground for how police officers should make sense of the complainants’ conduct towards the respective suspect: someone who was trying to steal money to fulfill his dependence, and a person who has a long history of wrongful, and indeed criminal behaviour in the neighbourhood. In other words, the counter-denunciations in extracts (1) and (4) involve a selection of a particular category that promotes a particular version of events in which the complainant is in fact the offender; and this version is further elaborated by juxtaposing it with an action (or list of actions) that work to solidify the counterdenunciation (for more on categorization and blame, see [29–31]). F.Ferraz de Almeida 1 3 6 Conclusion I have been concerned with the various ways through which suspects attempt to make putative victims/complainants at least partially responsible for the incidents for which they are investigated. Analysing audio-recorded police interviews with suspects in England, I have shown that these attempts—which I referred to as ‘counter-denunciations’ [5]—involve employing a series of discursive practices, including: (a) contrasting the complainant’s actions with their own innocent conduct; (b) historicizing the event being investigated; and (c) discrediting the complainant’s character—stigmatizing. In the cases examined in this article, the first practice was accomplished primarily through a contrastive device that sets apart the ordinariness of the scene in which the suspect and their family are participants, and the extraordinariness of the action(s) that disrupts the order and transform the innocent and mundane scene into one that was problematic, troubled—i.e., transgressions, or potential criminal offences. The second practice involved selecting particular descriptions to characterise the complainant’s wrongful conduct as recurrent and ongoing, situating the incident in a historicized context and making it part of a larger picture. In those cases, from the perspective of the suspect at least, the incident is to be understood as the result of an ongoing larger neighbourhood dispute for which the complainant is also responsible. The third practice refers to the categorization work done by these suspects to describe the victim/complainant. This involves selecting categories that discredit this other person and promotes a particular version of events in which the complainant is in fact the offender. This version is further elaborated by juxtaposing it with an action (or series of actions) that serves to solidify the counter-denunciation. It is particularly worth noticing the fact that these practices may and indeed are used in combination, as it is the case of extract 1 shown in the introduction, and further analyzed throughout the remainder of the paper. In that case, the suspect set a contrast between his own innocent behaviour and the other’s wrongful and disproportionate conduct, situates that conduct in a historical context (as recurring and ongoing), before directly attacking the complainant’s moral character by referring to him as a ‘nightmare neighbour’. These practices have in common the suspects’ reliance on the relational and contextual character of the categories ‘offender’ and ‘victim’. Rather than being treated as rigid and mutually exclusive, in a way that suggests that a participant involved in a potential crime would be either one or the other, the contrastive pair is seen as a flexible resource for displaying innocence and attributing blame and responsibility. In the cases shown above, suspects attempt to defend themselves not only by attacking the actions and character of the complainant, but also by portraying themselves as victims, through either describing the circumstances of that particular single incident (as in the first practice) or situating the incident as part of a larger neighbourhood conflict (as in the second practice). Previous language and law research in police interviews and interrogations has discussed different the sequential and categorial resources suspects mobilize to deny [7] or justify [8] a potential criminal offence. My analysis contributes to 1 3 Counter‑Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims inPolice… this literature by focusing on an underexplored defensive strategy, i.e., counterdenunciation, and scrutinizing the various discursive practices through which suspects accomplish them while being questioned by police officers. Although not designed to evaluate police officers and suspects’ practices, I am aware that this paper gives practitioners access to a range of discursive techniques used by both parties in police-suspect interactions and allows them to reflect on their own practices. One potential limitation of my work refers to the nature of the cases presented here. All police interviews in my data set were conducted in the context of neighbours’ disputes, although the alleged crimes for which they are being investigated encompass a wide range of low-level criminal offences. Not surprisingly then, suspects (and sometimes police officers) display an orientation to their relationship with the victim/complainant when answering the officers’ questions and producing their counter-denunciations. This orientation is more visible for example in the selection of categories to discredit the other’s character (‘nightmare neighbour’) or in the attempts to historicize the single event, a practice that draws upon the fact that suspect and victim live in close proximity, which creates social and material possibility for previous and ongoing contact and interaction [32]. In this sense, future research might investigate whether and to what extent the same practices are employed in interviews involving cases in which suspects, and victims shared a different connection (family, work, etc.) or are not directly connected at all. Acknowledgements In revising the paper for publication, I have benefitted from the insightful comments and suggestions made by Paul Drew and the anonymous reviewers. I would like to thank Frantisek Tuma, Jack Joyce and Sigurd D’hondt for comments on earlier drafts of this work. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Stokoe and Derek Edwards for making these data available to me, and to the police authority concerned for permission to use these material. Funding Open Access funding provided by University of Jyväskylä (JYU). Funding was provided by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Grant No. 0667-2014-5). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. 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