Bringing the Spoken Words Back In: Conversationalizing (Postmodernizing) Police-citizen Encounter Research

In prior police-citizen encounter research, the words citizens and suspects articulate were used as the primary representation of their demeanor toward the police. Despite its central role in prior works, language has been presupposed into the analysis as a formalistic assumption, and unanalyzed in its own right. Realizing this deficiency, Mastrofski and Parks (1990) advocated changes in methods of observing police work. In this article, a discourse analytic method of capturing the neglected details of the encounter between police and citizens is proffered by using a reality based TV show about police work as data. The article provides the theoretical and methodological framework for overcoming deficiencies in existing police research. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.