The Linguistic Disposition of Emergency Callers: Using Proximity Coefficients to Identify the Sentiments of Guilty and Innocent Emergency Callers

Abstract

AbstractStaging an emergency call is a form of detection avoidance that can obscure evidence and mislead police investigations. For example, having killed a person, a caller may stage an emergency call to cover it up as an accident, or a person having killed a victim may dispose of the body and call emergency services to claim they are missing. Similarly, inaccurately categorising an emergency call as staged can have large consequences on investigations. The aim of the current research is to assist with the use of emergency call analysis in police investigations by focusing on callers’ underlying psychological sentiment or ‘linguistic disposition’ (LD) in staged and authentic calls. The transcripts of real-world emergency calls from guilty and innocent individuals were linguistically analysed for markers of LD to develop an understanding of callers’ LD towards the subject of the call. Linguistic indicators were then quantified with a method known as proximity coefficients, which showed a difference in the type of disposition exhibited between guilty and innocent callers towards the subject of the call. These findings provide an initial step towards understanding how LD can be used to inform police investigations and outline the next steps for future research.