My law enforcement career began in the summer of 2003. After four years of applications, testing, oral boards, background checks, a pint of blood and my firstborn child, I finally got hired. Another three months at the Academy and a couple more in FTO, and I was a lean, mean, paperwork generating machine.
For the record, no one ever told me how much paperwork this job entailed. It might have been in the job description, but either I didn’t read it or it was vastly understated.
Boring!
I can’t remember one single episode of Cops dedicated to the relentless slog of bureaucratic paperwork and the endless documentation of the most inane occurrences. And do you know why? Because typing reports is freaking boring, that’s why! And don’t get me started on hypocritical Hollywood movies where you can blow up a city block, stack bodies like cordwood, and not fill out a single slip of paper. Real life is nothing like what you see on TV or in the movies.
Coptalk
During the years I’ve worked in detectives, I’ve had the opportunity to read other officer’s reports — lots of them. Suffice it to say that some were better than others. Some would have been better off written with crayon on a diner place mat while others read like assembly instructions for an Ikea bedroom set.
One report I read had to do with the officer witnessing a crime while he stopped to get gas. But that’s not what he wrote. He wrote something like, “I subsequently exited my fully marked patrol vehicle to begin standard refueling procedures when I was approached from the northeast by a white male witness blah blah blah.” He wasn’t docking a shuttle at the International Space Station, he was getting gas for heaven’s sake!
Evolve
Why do we do that? I’m not sure, exactly, but it certainly feels like we’re expected to talk that way, write that way, and testify that way. Well, it’s stupid, and we should stop doing it.
Look, there’s nothing special about me. I didn’t major in English or mail in enough cereal box tops to get a certificate in writing. I’ve just evolved over the years after making lots of mistakes and having to testify in court to my own crappy reports. But those experiences gave me the opportunity to learn from my mistakes and from the mistakes of others.
Not Cops, Weren’t There
I can’t overstate how critical your report writing is in order to paint an accurate picture of the events you encountered. The people who read your reports aren’t cops and weren’t there, so it’s our job to tell the story effectively and put them in our shoes.
Yes, we all hate report writing. The irony of it all is that paperwork so necessary. Yes it sucks, and yes it’s unbelievably time consuming, but it can be the difference between a successful prosecution or an epic fail, debunking a frivolous lawsuit or paying out millions.
Don’t Suck
Not only that, but if your writing sucks, every one who reads your reports will have the preconceived notion that you suck at your job. If you have lot’s of typos, they’ll think you’re lazy or sloppy. If you can’t use proper grammar, they’ll assume you’re an idiot. Simply proofreading your work and using spell check will go a long way, trust me.
So, write like a human, be descriptive, use plain language, and for the love of all that is sacred, use spell check. We’ll all be better for it.
- Do you use plain language when you talk and write, or are you fluent in Coptalk?
- Have you been on the stand and had your report come back to bite you?
- What can you do to improve the readability of your reports?
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