Abstract
Public and academic debate suggest a perception that institutions such as the police may be reluctant to apologise or ineffective when they do. This article takes the unusual step of considering the apology culture of the institution potentially offering apology as a crucial step in identifying possible barriers to change in institutional practice. I have analysed explicit apology language in letters written by Scottish police to individuals as a final stage in responding to their complaints about the police. Rather than police reluctance to apologise, I found the police potentially overusing apology language, in the sense that explicit apology language was consistently used where evidence both had and had not been found that the police were at fault. The grammatical construction of the explicit apology language differed between these two contexts. I conclude that police politeness culture includes an empirical norm to use explicit apology language in response to public complaints regardless of the outcome of that complaint, as part of their identity as a public service institution. Tension between this empirical norm and another aspect of police identity, as a law enforcement institution, is managed by a systematic grammatical distinction in apology language patterning with the complaint outcome.
Funding source: Arts and Humanities Research Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: AH/I011862/1
About the author
Ruth Friskney is a researcher based at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, UK. Her research interests lie in the interactions between people and institutions, investigated through language use. In particular, she focuses on the institutions of the justice system in relation to gender-based violence.
Acknowledgements
My data collection was facilitated by the then Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS). I am very grateful to all police professionals involved in my data collection and particularly the ACPOS professional standards lead for Scotland who supported this process. With thanks to colleagues who provided comments on early draughts of this manuscript and to my PhD supervisors for their insight throughout this research.
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Research funding: This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant [AH/I011862/1]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising. Data Access Statement: Due to ethical requirements, supporting data cannot be made openly available.
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Competing interests: None.
Legislation cited
Apologies (Scotland) Act 2016.
Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012.
Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012.
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