Abstract

This paper is aimed at assessing how power, control, and resistance come into play and how resistance counteracts power and control in police investigative interviewing. Considering that the Philippines was once a colony of the United States, it is essential to compare the two samples as the Philippine legal system is highly patterned after the American jurisprudence (Mercullo in JForensicRes 11:1–4, 2020). Highlighting the existing and emerging power relations between the police interviewer and the interviewee, the study employed Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s ( Recuenco, A. (2022). Cops to undergo investigation retraining to improve conviction rate. Manila Bulletin. https://mb.com.ph/2022/07/21/cops-to-undergo-investigation-retraining-to-improve-conviction-rate/ ) Conversation Analysis (CA) and Fairclough’s (Ehrlich in Coulthard and Johnson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, Routledge, 2010) Critical Language Studies (CLS) as general frameworks. A total of 10 Philippine and American police interviews were examined. While the Philippine corpus was obtained from the Pasay City Police Station, Metro Manila, the American corpus was culled from forensicling.com, an open-access website containing forensic linguistic data. Findings revealed that power and control were employed by the police in both contexts with 109 evidential markers (50.7%) and 2,443 representative speech acts (63.3%) having the highest frequency of occurrence. What is striking is the fact that police officers in both Philippine and American contexts show power and control in their utterances to be able to achieve the goal of police interviewing, that is, to gather information and elicit voluntary responses from the interviewees. Through this study, it is hoped that interviewers will be able to explore a better system of the questioning process that may lead the interviewees to cooperate more with them and arrive at a more accurate information.