The professional speech culture of a police officer

Abstract

The most important guideline for the professional conduct of police officers is speech culture—the ability to select and use optimal linguistic means in specific situations of lawmaking and law enforcement. A police officer must fully master the culture of speech, which involves the development of all its components: normative, ethical, and communicative. The communicative qualities of an MIA employee’s language should be characterized by content accuracy, grammatical correctness, expressiveness, purity, logic, and a rich vocabulary. Such speech is called standardized, meaning it adheres to all the norms of the (literary) language. An objective analysis of the normative aspect allows for the identification of various speech errors and shortcomings committed by police officers in oral and written communication. Among the typical problems, the following are highlighted: frequent violations of lexical norms, orthoepic errors, the use of officialese (chancery list) and clichés outside their stylistic purpose, as well as the use of invective lexis, dialectisms, jargon, barbarisms, vulgarisms, filler words, interjections, and inappropriate sounds. It is concluded that compliance with literary language norms is an integral part of a police officer’s professional activity. Since official speech is a form of literary language, strict adherence to its standards is a basic condition for a law enforcement officer’s high speech culture. A police officer’s speech must be grammatically correct and comply with the norms of the literary language. When talking to citizens, an officer must choose words accurately, considering their psychological impact. In communication, rude jokes, malicious irony, inappropriate words and phrases (including those of foreign origin), as well as sharp cynical expressions of a disdainful nature, vulgarisms, primitivisms, and filler words are unacceptable. Any deviation from ethical linguistic standards not only undermines the authority of an individual employee but also deforms the public perception of the entire law enforcement institution. Consequently, the development of communicative stability and the ability to master the word in critical situations becomes a guarantee for the effective performance of official duties in a state governed by the rule of law.