‘Wanna still nine hard?’: Exploring Mechanisms of Police Bias in the Translation and Interpretation of Wiretap Conversations

Wiretaps permit police to intercept telephone conversations among targets of investigation, some of which are judged to be incriminating by those listening to the real-time conversations. How is the information intercepted from wiretaps interpreted, understood, and used? What is required to transform raw communications intercepts into evidence of probable cause? Forensic linguists have studied transcripts of intercepted conversations, focusing on the wiretap entextualization process—that is, the ways in which intercepted conversations are classified as incriminating, and converted into evidence of crimes. They hypothesize the wiretap entextualization process is prejudiced in favor of police theories of criminal actions. This paper considers forensic linguists’ police bias arguments, and offers details into mechanisms that create police predispositions to interpret conversations intercepted under a wiretap order as crimes. The analysis applies Shuy’s (2005) conversational strategies to create crime to nine conversations intercepted in a federal wiretap. Transcripts are examined by comparing conversations with their police translations. Findings suggest police bias is embedded deeply into wiretap operations, and that there are several means by which police preconceptions of crime undergird wiretap transcripts.