Communicating and categorising ‘kidnap’ incidents in UK police emergency calls: a conversation analytic study

Abstract

This study of police emergency calls in the UK addresses the interactional work conducted when dealing with reports of kidnap. In the UK, kidnap is classed as a type of ‘crime-in-action’, known to be complex to categorise and code for the appropriate police response. Using the qualitative method of ‘conversation analysis’, we address this complexity through analysing a dataset of anonymised emergency calls which are, at some point during the call or subsequent police investigation, categorised as ‘kidnap’. Analysing the calls, their categorisations and the accompanying incident logs, we aim to understand the difficulties that can arise in identifying this type of high-stakes incident at the first point of police contact. We find callers encode differing levels of ‘entitlement’ in requests for police assistance, with potential effects on call-handlers’ decisions about kidnap categorisations., We also observe interactional difficulties in establishing information about the incident, either through the caller’s displayed lack of knowledge or certainty, difficulty in producing turns or sometimes resistance to providing further information. These features may render the call-handler’s task of categorising incidents as ‘kidnap’ more challenging. Our identification of these communicative patterns has potential benefits for call-handlers’ practices in the police control room, providing an evidence-base from real-life talk for training. The findings also have implications at an institutional level, as they shed light on the negotiations that underly ‘categorisation’ work in policing, where there may sometimes only be a tacit understanding of how crime categories are decided during initial reports from the public.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2024.2386282
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
Additional Information: Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Uncontrolled Keywords: emergency calls,kidnap,conversation analysis
Publication ISSN: 1477-2728
Last Modified: 07 Oct 2024 07:59
Date Deposited: 19 Aug 2024 07:38
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.tan ... 63.2024.2386282 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2024-08-15
Published Online Date: 2024-08-15
Accepted Date: 2024-07-25
Authors: Atkins, Sarah (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-3481-5681)
Richardson, Emma
Traynor, Joanne
Deamer, Felicity (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-6466-9211)

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