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Part of
Questioning and Answering Practices across Contexts and Cultures
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 323] 2021
► pp. 145–164

“You were resisting the whole time!”

Assumption of guilt in police-civilian question-response interactions

| Old Dominion University

This chapter uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000) to examine white police interactions with Black civilians in the United States. The syntactic, pragmatic, and discursive evidence in the interactions indicates the officers approach the interactions through an arrest framework based on assumption of civilian guilt. In contrast, it is arguable from the ways civilians ask questions and react to the officers’ accusations they frame the interactions as information exchanges. Because of this difference in framing, officers interpret actions allowable within an information exchange as “resistance” within an arrest framework, justifiying use of force against the civilians. This bias in the way civilians are treated when officers assume guilt problematizes this institutional interaction as unsafe for Black civilians.

Keywords: police, race, critical discourse analysis (CDA), framing, questions, forensic linguistics, police interactions, resistance, American English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Institutional discourse
    • 2.2Assumption of guilt
    • 2.3Question-response relationships
    • 2.4Framing differences
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Initial question/response sequences
    • 4.2Assumption of guilt
    • 4.3Conflicting frames
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.323.05cas
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