A sidelight to the investigation of a recent police shooting - it turns out Denver police dispatchers are writing down exactly what people tell them. Seems innocuous?
Lemme aks you sumpin'.
D'ya think the Denver Police Department policy of transcribing poh-lice interviews in black dialect is racially insensitive? Or am I jus' bein' hyxsterical?
{...}
Police say they try to transcribe the words in interviews exactly as they are pronounced by the person being questioned. The cops say they do it across the board.
Every mispronunciation gets written phonetically, regardless of the race of the speaker, Denver's public safety manager insisted.
"I know the implication is that someone is trying to put a racial spin on something," explained Al LaCabe, who is African-American. "But the transcriptionists are trying to be as accurate as possible."
This is ludicrous. Language is a fluid thing, and mis-pronunciations are universal. I know a bit about this subject and let me assure everyone, no one pronounces everything correctly. This phenomonon is so common that the listener will not even notice when some words are mis-pronounced.
Here's an example. People in northern Minnesota and North Dakota tend to pronounce the word 'three' as 'tree.' You may not notice that, but it's true. (go back and watch the movie Fargo again) To complicate matters, it's not always clear when the word 'three' becomes 'tree.' There's various shades of graduation, where the speaker says something in between the two, something that sounds like 'chree.' If you were to make a transcription of a conversation and had to write that word, you would have to make a subjective judgement as to whether to write the word as 'three,' tree,' or 'chree.' Why would anyone want the transcriptionists to make these judgements? Why not just write the words as they are obviously meant to be?
Posted by Walter at October 26, 2003 08:38 PM