Journal of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria Volume 17 Nos. 1 & 2 2014 (pp. 43-61) Interrogation, Questioning or Interview?: Police-Suspects Interactions in Nigeria Temitope Michael Ajayi Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan, Nigeria E-mail: michealtemitope@yahoo.com, ajayi.temitope@dlc.ui.edu.ng Interviews and interrogations are important tools for securing convictions against the guilty and freeing the wrongly accused. As a response to the agitation of human rights activists in Nigeria on the latter, there have been efforts by the Nigeria Police to reconceptualise what transpires between men of the institution and suspects during investigations. As such, the institution now adopts, in principle, a more humane and non-coercive approach known as questioning at the expense of the much criticised approach known as interrogation in getting information and confession from suspects. In practice, however, not much demarcation has been made between the two terms and the third related one, interview. While this is obvious from keen observation, various existing works have glossed over it. This work therefore sets to attempt a conceptualisation of these three, with a view to ascertaining their place in the vocabulary of the Nigeria Police. Keywords: Police-Suspect interactions, Interrogation, Questioning, Interview, Nigeria Word count: 146 1. Introduction The interview conducted with the OC General Investigation 1 (OCGI) of the station used as the setting for this research work and the observation made during data collection proper have given birth to this work. In the course of the interview that lasted about thirty minutes on my first day in the station, precisely in the OCI’s office, I emphasised my interest in the language used in “interrogating” suspects by the police. The said OCGI was quick to point my attention to the fact that the use of interrogation in my research topic was inappropriate. Interrogation, he claimed, is no longer in the parlance of the Nigeria Police, as a group of human rights activists had earlier fought against the use of the word in police-suspects’ interaction. He explained the word interrogate or interrogation connotes or carries elements of coercion, force, humiliation and dehumanisation. Hence, instead, police-suspects’ interaction can best be described as questioning. However, what became obvious in the course of data collection was the constant use of the words “interrogation and interrogate” by IPOs while dealing with suspects. Also, one of the IPOs interacted in the process of data collection used the word interview while describing what transpired between him, his OC and a suspect. 1 Officer in Charge of General Investigation