The Language of <i>COPS</i>

Television programs have played a central part in portraying features of American popular culture. From cowboys to courtroom dramas, these programs, among others, give viewers a picture of different cultural expressions of events that constitute life in the nation. Furthermore, these programs could be considered therapeutic; they get us away from the rituals of daily life. One program that can be considered as a feature of popular culture is the often-aired program COPS. We use the term culture within the sociological definition as a way of life expressed in art and artifact that characterize a people. There are several approaches that I could use to examine a program such as COPS as a reflection of popular culture. For example, I could look at the topic of officer recruitment in light of the emphasis on diversity in the workplace, officer training, relationship of police officials to the courts and to the community that they serve, methods of crime reduction, and so on. It goes without saying that investigators explore areas of inquiry that reflect their training or areas of curiosity. As an individual interested in the study of language in its social context, I have found that the program COPS provides data for analysis. As Pandit notes, language is put to use in a society; any instance of verbal encounter transmits and reasserts the norms and values shared by the speakers (174). Discussions about the structure and use of oral communication can be seen from various perspectives. At one level, investigators can make judgments about social class and language use (Wolfram and Fasold 1-2). In studying language in its social context in the United States, this research methodology has been used in the earliest part of the twentieth century, with results that culminated in the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Research in this area came under the general heading of dialectology, in which the focus was on looking at grammar, morphology, lexicon, and sound change that could be considered as belonging to a specific geographic area and to specific social groups in that area (Pederson et al. 17-18). As a follow-up to such studies, Labov's pioneering work in New York City and subsequent analyses of language have added to our knowledge about the relationship of social variables to language form and structure (Macaulay 70-71)1. At another level, I might consider a study of oral communication within the dimension of discourse analysis as advanced by such investigators as Stillar (91-92). In these studies, investigators bring to bear such issues as the topic, purpose, setting, speech events, and participants and their role in communication. In short, speakers take these issues into account before and during moments of verbal interaction. These factors of communication, I believe, are carried out in a very rapid manner since speakers could not be seen as stopping to make these judgments as they communicate (Taylor and Taylor 102)2. What might be of interest, in addition to the issues of communication cited above, is to look further to see what goes into the construction of utterances. According to Taylor and Taylor, speakers go through four stages in communication: conceptualize, select, formulate, and articulate (99). The same procedure might also apply to some degree in written communication. These features of communication are part of the interplay of language and thought, a discipline known as psycholinguistics. In brief, an individual thinks of what he or she wants to say. Next, the individual selects words according to their phonological shapes, puts these words into a sentence with the appropriate grammatical classes (e.g. noun, adjective, verb), and finally articulates that message. Thus, rather than see communication as separate subdisciplines – sociolinguistics or psycholinguistics – the better approach would be to see them as co-occurring elements of communication. In other words, speakers bring together aspects of social factors (e.g., age, gender, speech situation) with their thought processes simultaneously. Language study is a very broad academic enterprise, and it is imperative that investigators narrow the scope of study. Unmindful of the areas of interest being pursued, however, one strategy that researchers generally follow is to look at the structural components of language. These structural components are phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. For example, let us take the case of phonology. One method of analysis takes into account the larger sociocultural factors (e.g., age, education, ethnicity, gender, region) that shape the pronunciation of a word or words. For instance, some speakers of American English drop the final consonant of words such as cold or bold to produce col [kol] and bol [bol] while others tend to keep it. For the analyst of language, however, he or she desires to learn about the conditions that influence the pronunciation of such words. In studying language heard and used in the program COPS, I may use a similar method of inquiry as that established when studying the structural components of language. Given the scope of inquiry, it might not be profitable to specify all of the structural elements of language.3 However, I would like to know some of the possible variables or conditions that shape the type of language used in certain speech situations involving officers and suspects. The aim of this study is to identify specific types of linguistic structures, specifically syntactic ones, and the social situations under which police officers use them when confronting suspects or when responding to events of lawbreaking. Data for this report were obtained from viewing several segments of the program COPS aired in Baltimore on Saturday and on Sunday evenings. These episodes, usually of an hour's duration, represent segments of the program taped in various cities of various sizes across the nation. I used thirty episodes of the program from which to draw conclusions about the forms of language used by officers in encountering individuals thought to be involved in illegal activities. In observing the program, I was interested to determine the variables that influence the choice of language heard and used by officers in COPS. I hypothesize that the most salient variables that influenced the type of language used by officers were type of crime, length of employment, and gender. On the other hand, having listened to several episodes of the program, I established three linguistic categories of language used: statements, questions, and commands.4 To claim that a specific language form belonged to a specific category, I noticed its linguistic structure with respect to the arrangement of units in the utterance. Commands, for example, were of the form of a verb with or without a noun. Thus, the expressions 'Hands up“ or ”Put your hands up“ would constitute a command. Questions, on the other hand, were of the form of preposed auxiliary (e.g., do, have, will, can) followed by a subject and the verb with or without a tag unit or with rising intonation as in ”Have I seen you before?,“ ”Do you live here?,“ or ”You don't have any weapons, do you?,“ respectively. As was mentioned above, I established three broad social variables: type of crime length of employment, and gender. Of course, I could have established other social variables (e.g., city size, time when crimes were committed, race of suspects, household type). To include other variables, however, would go beyond the scope of this study To facilitate an examination of language used by officers in the program COPS, I was interested primarily with how officers used language when they encountered individuals initially. These speech situations could involve one officer or several officers using the same form of language simultaneously. The initial verbal exchange allowed me to isolate specific units of language since communication between officers and suspects became more complex involving various linguistic units as the dialogue continued. The initial exchange is pertinent since it provides an analyst with language as it is first heard and from which I can draw several conclusions5. This initial use of language is not that farfetched since, as speakers and as listeners, I make certain inferences about speakers when I encounter them initially in greetings, in making requests, in asking for directions, and so on. It is also part of what Finegan and others refer to as “markers of register” (336). For this study, I used a statistical test of cross tabulation and chi-square. Cross tabulation was relevant since I was interested to determine, in tabular form, the relationship between two or more categorical variables (George and Mallory 94). Categorical variables give us an either-or approach to our analysis (e.g., gender: male, female; ethnicity: Asian, Hispanic). I set out to determine if specific variables were in any way correlated with language used by police officers in COPS. Several findings were most salient in this study. First, I found that there was a relationship between the type of language that officers used and the length of time that they were employed in a given law enforcement unit. Second, there was a relationship between language style and type of crime involved. Regarding the former, I found that new officers, those employed from one to five years, used commands more often than did middle-career officers, that is, those employed from six to ten years. As for type of crime and style of language, I observed that officers used commands when dealing with severe crime, questions with moderate crimes, and statements when confronting mild forms of crime. There were not enough instances of language used that involved officers of longer tenure, that is, ten years or more. Regarding language type and type of crime, officers used commands more often than statements and questions when confronting suspects initially. This situation might be attributed to the fact that there were more instances of severe crimes (e.g., robbery with gun, high-speed car chase, breaking and entering into a residence, vehicle theft) than those considered moderate (e.g., narcotics use, stolen goods, driving without a license) or low (e.g., noise from neighbors, loitering, littering). We had to discard the variable of gender since there were not enough instances of women officers responding to law-breaking events in COPS. In the few instances where women were on patrol, there was no difference in the way women used language and the type of crime events when compared to men. The question that arises is this: What message can I draw from these findings? This view of communication and its relationship to crime is similar to that advanced by Radford et al and the concept of audience design. By audience design, speakers assess the sociolinguistic characteristics of addressees and adapt their speech to conform to these characteristics (57). This view of language use seems relevant here in that police officers, in selecting a style of language – commands, questions, statements – took into account the situation that they encountered (e.g., high speed chase, narcotic sales, stolen vehicles) and used the style of language appropriate to that situation. This view is also similar to Finnegan's notion of “situation of use” (350). It is as if the officers surmised that they should get control of events and that one way in which that could be done was to use the type of language suitable for that crime situation. In addition, Stillar's concept of theme seems relevant in this analysis. By theme, I mean that there is an order of linguistic elements in language, in this case, the English language (46). In English, the theme of a sentence is marked by units that occur in the initial position. In commands, we assign actions that we want our listeners to carry out. From the data, officers used commands more often than questions or statements. In commanding an individual to “Put the gun down,” the theme was on the weapon, as opposed to the command “Put the gun down on the floor,” where the prepositional phrase “on the floor” would be a secondary feature of the command. In addition, this analysis of language and social situations further supports the notion of communicative competence (O'Grady et. al 454). In other words, unlike grammatical competence, which allows us to determine grammatical from ungrammatical utterances, communicative competence allows speakers to use language that is appropriate to the situation or context. As Chomsky has pointed out, “Language is the communicative system par excellence, and it is ‘peculiar and eccentric’ to insist on studying the structure of language apart from its communicative function” (55). The idea of communicative competence comes to our attention in that officers have internalized the rules for using language in specific situations when encountering suspects. It could be that knowledge and use of language could have been part of the officers' training or work experience. Whichever the case, it is instructive to point out that knowledge and use of language are salient features to be noted in looking at language from the perspective of officers and suspects. Closely related to the choice of language used in speech situations is the tone or prosody that accompanies it. As Kolb and Whishaw point out, “Spoken language carries two types of information: information derived from the content, and information inferred from the tone or voice used” (551). Research in neuropsychology suggests that the former appears to be a function of the left hemisphere; the latter, the right hemisphere. It is safe to say that commands, for instance, convey a more serious tone than statements or questions. Thus, I may conclude that officers, in using commands, do so with the purpose of conveying a sense of fear and authority in their initial encounter with persons thought to be involved in crime, especially those of a serious nature. The choice of language used by officers is in keeping with the notion of a speech act. In other words, we do things with words when we use them. In saying to someone “Can I see your driver's license?,” we are not just saying things, we are making a request. In speech act theory, utterances convey a locutionary and an illocutionary force. The locutionary force consists of the act of saying; the illocutionary act is what is conveyed by the words themselves (Parker and Riley 18-20). Finally, choice of language reflects the values that speakers convey to listeners, in this case, to suspects. In many instances of COPS, officers took pride in conveying to the audience the satisfaction that they receive in making the community a better place for residents if they can bring a sense of order and control in law-breaking events. In many instances, an officer can be heard saying, “This is why I do my job. If I can take the bad guys off the street, it makes the job meaningful.” In this study our purpose was to show that there is a relationship between certain forms of language used by police officers in encountering suspects and certain social values associated with police officers. We found that commands were the chief forms of language used by officers in confronting suspects. This use of language I attributed to the nature of crime, that is, especially severe ones. Studies of this type should also support existing studies of language in its social context. The following are portions of data used in the study. They are presented as examples of categories of crime and the type of language used with them. I use the categories of mild, moderate and severe to delineate types of crime. The speech situation is noted in parentheses.

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