What Happened?: An Epistemics of Before and After in “At-the-Scene” Police Questioning

Abstract

When police arrive at the scene of a possible crime or accident, they make inquiries of participants to determine what sort of prior events have transpired to lead to the situation. Examination of unedited sections of a reality television show based on police work (among other data) demonstrates that officers' use of What happened? typically elicits (and/or pursues) a narrative, an “ontogeny” of how a particular problem event came to be. In this article, I analyze how answerers in these police–citizen interactions construct narratives to put themselves in the best light, particularly via techniques of what, along the lines of Sacks' (1984) term “doing being ordinary,” might be called doing being extraordinary. Although the What happened? question confers on the answerer an authority to answer as “someone who was there,” officers nevertheless mobilize their commonsense understandings of events as temporally unfolding and accountably ordered phenomena to monitor and challenge the plausibility of answerers' accounts.

Notes

I thank Don Zimmerman, Research on Language and Social Interaction Associate Editor Charles Antaki, Tanya Stivers, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. This research was made possible in part through a grant from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

¹From personal communication with former Fox producer, 2004. See also Itzkoff (2007).

²In Extract 4, Michael closes his eye when he begins to cry, and in this way, it is not a direct appeal to the caregiver for assistance. The crying, however, is most certainly designed to bring attention to his situation as well as to formulate his objection to what the other child has done.

³In the later position, reformulations work to characterize the problem in new terms and challenge prior formulations.

⁴In a non-police case that bears on this point, the questioner, overhearing someone talk about having to give her cat injections, asks, “What happened?.” The questioner treats the answerer's problem characterization “she's sick” as inadequate with a rolling hand gesture designed to prompt answerer to continue:

⁵These authors have reported that in courtroom and news interview talk, recipients tend to withhold continuers and any other sort of receipt or assessment tokens. Police, however, routinely provide responsive feedback over the course of citizens' storytelling turns but withhold a final receipt or evaluation of the story.