‘I'd grab the S-O-B by his hair and yank him out the window’: The fraternal order of warnings and threats in police–citizen encounters

Abstract

In prior research, warnings and threats have been regarded as closely related speech acts, distinguished only by an unobservable state. In this article, I conceptualize warnings and threats as fraternal speech acts because they share the essential genetic trait of their rhetorical parent: force. In this article, I examine the ‘warnings’ that police officers give to motorists during traffic stops, and the threats that police make to citizens and suspects during routine patrol work. I argue that, by virtue of their institutional identity and ideological mandate, there is no interpretive context free of coercion in the context of police–citizen encounters. I locate the difference between warnings and threats – direct and indirect – in the ordinal level of force embedded in the intention of speakers and in the unfavorable consequences suffered by the addressee.