police lineup
4
3.4
- noun
- /pəˈlis ˈlaɪnˌʌp/
- US
:
fila de identificación
- The kind of man who could engineer a police lineup from all his years of contacts in the N.Y.P.D.
Examples
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Investigators examined all the plausible candidates as if they were looking over the suspects in a police lineup.
Academic text (2003) -
You would be singled out in a police lineup of 1,000 suspects.
Blog text (8) -
His name gets recognition "the way the guilty do in a police lineup."
Blog text (32) -
The only lineup we should be concerned about is the police lineup.
-
He could engineer a police lineup through his contacts in NYPD.
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But in all these cases, from Kirby onward, whether they involved police lineups or interrogations, the defendant faced law enforcement officials, not prosecutors.
Academic text (2017) -
Mailer cast himself as tough cop Francis Xavier Pope, who seems to have a ball as we see a rugged assortment of characters during a police lineup.
Blog text (28) -
Later that evening, Brennan singled out Oswald in a police lineup as the person who most resembled the man in the window, but he was unwilling to make a positive identification.
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The dissent acknowledged and distinguished authority like Kirby and Gouveia, where the Supreme Court had rejected attachment of the right in relatively untroubling situations like police lineups, prison administrative detention, and failure of the police to notify a defendant of his attorney's attempts to make contact.
Academic text (2017) -
The witness pointed out the suspect in the police lineup after a long search for clues.
Synonyms
79
3.4
A group of people arranged so a witness can pick the suspect
1
7.2
A line of people arranged by police so a witness can pick a suspect
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and compositionally derived from 'police' (law-enforcement organization) modifying 'lineup' (a group of people arranged for identification). This noun–noun composition follows a common English pattern and is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should understand the MWE.
Etymology
Police lineup comes from the literal scene where the police make several people stand in a lineup so a witness can look at them and pick the person they saw. That's why the phrase now means the police process to 'identify the suspect'.