The police interrogation is a practice upheld by police officers as a crucial means of gathering information and disposing of cases and denounced by civil rights advocates as a serious threat to the standards of fairness and due process. This paper argues that each of these characterizations is severely limited and ultimately misrepresentative of the more subtle functions of interrogative practices. Specifically, drawing upon the research literature in Britain, the United States and Canada, the paper conceptualizes the police interrogation as an interactional medium in which commitments are fashioned to particular criminal identities and renditions of events in a manner that seeks to confirm and legitimize official police narratives. The article examines the implications of this constitutive, rather than merely coercive, function of the interrogation with particular attention to the issues of police accountability and the limits of legislative reform. Cases cited, references