What Happened? : An Epistemics of Before and After in “At-the-Scene” Police Questioning

When police arrive at the scene of a possible crime or accident, they make inquiries of participants to determine what sort of prior events have transpired to lead to the situation. Examination of unedited sections of a reality television show based on police work (among other data) demonstrates that officers' use of What happened? typically elicits (and/or pursues) a narrative, an “ontogeny” of how a particular problem event came to be. In this article, I analyze how answerers in these police–citizen interactions construct narratives to put themselves in the best light, particularly via techniques of what, along the lines of Sacks' (1984) Sacks, H. 1984. “On doing “being ordinary.”. In Structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis, Edited by: Atkinson, J. M. and Heritage, J. 413–429. Cambridge, , England: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar] term “doing being ordinary,” might be called doing being extraordinary. Although the What happened? question confers on the answerer an authority to answer as “someone who was there,” officers nevertheless mobilize their commonsense understandings of events as temporally unfolding and accountably ordered phenomena to monitor and challenge the plausibility of answerers' accounts.