Come on you LEO's let's start taking a bit more time with those reports.

I used to represent deputy sheriffs in lawsuits brought by people claiming violations of their civil rights. The officers had to eat many a report because of a lack of facts and explanation for the officers' actions. I have tried to explain to them that they will win or lose based upon the report. What usually happens is the officers are going off duty and want to get the reports done so that they can go home or the incident is so painful they do not want to relive it. When there is a shooting involved, the officers frequently report that they feared for their lives but do not say what caused them to fear for their lives. Officers need to write complete reports and proof read them. Its not to make my job of defending them easier, it is documenting what happened and to protect them later. It also helps the prosecutor in making the criminal case.
 
I used to tell my people "screwing up an investigation is bad enough, but if you screw up a report you are really in trouble." Keep shootin'
 
CAJUNLAWYER said:
Was in court for motion day this morning and had a client charged with obscenity. He was peeing behind a building. :rolleyes: Anyway I was trying to get the charge reduced fo peeing in public which is now a crime in Louisiana (used to be that if caught the only thing they could charge you with was obscenity whinh is a sex reporting crime and sometimes you got a DA that wouldn't reduce to DP-so the legislature passed a bill to make is specifically illegal to pee in public). Anyway I digest.
So we were doing the Preliminary Hearing and I was reviewing the police report and according to the reporting LEO my client was "behind the building with his pennies clearly visible at which time he was arrested." I agreed to waive live testimony and let the report speak for itself regarding probable cause......
Pled him out to peeing in public :D

Then the next one I pick up has the victim suffering from "all timers".
Oh well.........live from the front lines of the criminal justice system ;).
Click to expand...

Thank god you need to have a college education to be in law enforcement these days! ; )
 
I once worked with an officer who wrote exactly like he spoke. Any reports that could possibly go to court were written by his partner. :(

Anyway, I have seen a number of his reports that contained phrases like" The wall was beat in by a slug (sledge) hammer", "Entry was made to the house by pulling the scream (screen) outta the window".

The most remembered report though involved the theft and location of the victim's bicycle: " The bicycle was parked on his (nickname for Richard)" We believed it was actually located behind the house on the deck. :D
 
I do the property crimes case management in my precinct; I read all of the incident reports and then assign them to detectives or others for follow-up or for their information. I find myself laughing out loud pretty frequently.

I began posting the most amusing and most poorly written reports, after highlighting them, on a section of the squad room bulletin board I labeled as "Report Of The Week." The most egregious offenders were regularly pummeled by their peers and, sadly for my entertainment factor, the quality of the writing has improved.
 
Got ya'll beat....I read one when I was an investigator with the DA's Office that I will never forget, a patrol officer for the county police department wrote in a rape report "the penetrator had an organism in the victims virginia"

Had another one submitted to us that read (Peeping Tom case) "I witnessed the offender named above master (struck through) mester (struck through) mastur (struck through) (the the writer used a two word phrase that most of us would recognize as a more "common" term for what he was trying to say).............
The defense attorney had him on the stand and asked him how he knew that his client was doing "that"........it was a LONG day in the courtroom for that particular officer.....Hilarity ensued......
 
I had a young graduate engineer from an inner-city "University" assigned to me for a couple of months. You wouldn't believe the reports he wrote for management. I proof-read them for him and sent 'em on through. There was no place to start to correct the spelling and grammar.

That college degree ain't no substitute for an education.
 
The most remembered report though involved the theft and location of the victim's bicycle: " The bicycle was parked on his (nickname for Richard)" We believed it was actually located behind the house on the deck. :D
Click to expand...


WOW, that's gotta hurt when you get get a bicycle parked on your pennies!!!
 
This gives you something to think about the next time you're about to complain about grammar or spelling "Nazis". Most aren't doing it just to be petty nitpickers. In cases as we have seen above, it can have serious consequences. In the case of threads on publicly accessible forums, it can reinforce the image of gun enthusiasts as ignorant, illiterate rednecks.

As I like to say, learn from the other fellow's mistakes. Oh, and "all timers" disease? Duh, it's Old Timer's.
 
An investigator did a report where a guy committed suicide by hanging himself from the balcony of a three story building....BUT the report said the man was found hanging from his bologna. That investigator ended up being our Chief of police....Another reason I had to retire.
 
Muley Gil said:
The bicycle was parked on his (nickname for Richard)"
Click to expand...

Wish Y'all'd quit makin' fun of my name.

Way back 10 years ago I registered for the two forum (fori?) owned by the former owner here. But when I tried to put my name in the sig-line, it replaced it with ****, just like Lee's software. Para saw that and sent me a private message he was sorry. Then within the week I went from **** Burg to Dick Burg. What a relief. And I haven't even had a bicycle parked on me!

Back to the law issue here, a guy should be required to have criminal intent to commit a sex crime. He probably thought he was in "private" not in public when he started taking his leak. Little did he know a peeping tom policeman was laying in wait, trying to see his pennies. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of new officers they're bringing up these days.

I'm thinking they should revise the sex offender registry. Anyone convicted of a minor "sex crime" like taking a leak should have his/her house covered with a big yellow dot. That way you'd know it wasn't something serious.
 
You need to check your own prose/typos before knocking the cops.
 
I keep thinking that that is what alley's are for--well in Texas, anyway.
Now, and it is a true story, when the deputy sheriff down in Abbeville wrote me that ticket on Hwy 82---which he should not have done--but Texas folks are fair game--I digest :p--I told him to hurry up I had to whizz---he said go ahead, aint nobody here that cares.
Blessings
 
I wonder if I could earn a big consultancy fee by studying how much of this is caused by:-

1) lack of education

or

2) the deadly combination of a tired, fat-fingered, untrained typist (LEO) and a spell checker has not been set to ask for confirmation before it changes words.

As the old joke goes: "It must be rite, my chequer tolled me sew!"
 
At least when he was "pinching his pennies" he didn't ask for change back.


I can tell you that report writing is a pet peeve of mine. In jail we have to do alot of meaningless entries twice hourly and in between and for every little thing under the sun. Then of course there are misbehavior reports, unusual incident reports (and boy have I seen some unusual incidents), memorandums, and then of course there are us guys who are booking officers which involve medical, behavioral health screenings and then of course property intake, and a bunch of other stuff, and almost none of that has spellcheck. So we have alot of people, especially our younger officers who haven't read a book that doesn't involve a brown wrapper in years, have no idea about grammar or spelling. It was pretty good for awhile I had a guy giving me $25 to type his memorandums (which he read to me and then signed) because it sounded like it was being read aloud by Captain Caveman if he did it. We had a report writing class in academy, but it was only very short and most of the guys were nodding off. Alot of charges have been tossed in all the courts and in house in every place of law enforcement that I have heard of.
 
We tried to help out some of our officers by sending them to a basic English class, covering grammar, etc., lasting about half a day.

I laughed so hard I almost wet myself when one of the officers on my relief turned in his overtime slip, with this description of his OT:
"Grammer class."

I saved a copy of that one!
 
zoom6zoom said:
This gives you something to think about the next time you're about to complain about grammar or spelling "Nazis". Most aren't doing it just to be petty nitpickers. In cases as we have seen above, it can have serious consequences. In the case of threads on publicly accessible forums, it can reinforce the image of gun enthusiasts as ignorant, illiterate rednecks.

As I like to say, learn from the other fellow's mistakes. Oh, and "all timers" disease? Duh, it's Old Timer's.
Click to expand...

Remember, it's the difference in helping your Uncle Jack off his horse and helping your uncle jack.......you get the picture
 
I've had to review thousands of case reports through the years. Yep, there were some great ones.

I tried to remind the guys that even commas can save lives. For instance, envision grandkids saying:
1 - "Let's eat, Grandma!"
-or-
2- "Lets eat Grandma!"
 
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