Mechanics of Police Report Writing

Mechanics of Police Report Writing and Field Note Taking

Kolb Learning Style -- Stage 1, "Having an Experience" "Concrete Experience"

It was in late October in a small town near my home in 1998, and I was on a ride-along with a county sheriff's deputy in a black and white (a Ford Crown Victoria). I was on the ride along because I had thought about taking law enforcement classes at our community college and thought I would get a first hand look at how a typical police shift goes. Maybe we'd catch some bank robbers, or alternatively bring some peace to a domestic disturbance between a husband and wife. The officer I was with was a high school buddy with my dad; we knew him and his family and we had been in Fourth of July picnics and barbeques with his family. My sister and his daughter were close friends and went to concerts together, so we had a friendship prior to my ride along with him.

Some people think it must be glamorous to be a soldier in a nice crisp uniform, or a police officer in his nice crisp heavy starched uniform, but it is not glamorous at all, in fact it can be the dirtiest most dangerous job in the world outside of being an infantry soldier in a war zone.

See, my Uncle Ralph was a police officer and I remember when I was a little boy he would come visit his sister (my mother) at our house after his shift, and I was really impressed with his uniform, his belt, his Billy club and of course his weapon. He smoked cigars and chewed tobacco, and so as a kid in elementary school (I think I was in the 3rd grade) I figured that was what all police officers did. He would take off his hat, go to the fridge and pull out one of my dad's beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon); my dad worked two jobs, one as a part time pastor for a Methodist church, and the other job was working nights as an auditor. He loved Uncle Ralph so he didn't mind him taking a beer and hanging out with his sister, my mom, for a little while. Then he would sit back and tell us what happened that day on the beat. He worked the streets and he drove a squad car too, depending on what day it was.

He was the kind of cop who wasn't pushy or abusive with his power. He always felt sorry for people who had been injured or hurt by criminals, but I think he took out his anger on the criminal sometimes. He said he roughed up a street thief once after the thief had grabbed an elderly lady's purse. Uncle Ralph said he got a good description of the street thief and using his "sources" he found where the thief hung out who was homeless I guess. The way Uncle Ralph told the story he caught up with the suspect and cornered him, demanding the purse back. The thief then spit in Uncle Ralph's face and that got my uncle furious. I guess he punched him and pushed him before handcuffing him and hauling him in.

The interest I showed in law enforcement because of my mom's brother Ralph transferred over to my desire to ride along and find out what it is like to be in a police officer's shoes. Mindful of the problems that police officers face through the kind of work they do, I wasn't positive I wanted to work towards a career in law enforcement, but I needed to find out some information about it first hand, so I did the ride along.

So we cruised all the side streets in this unincorporated town of 23,000 or so and saw what looked like drug dealing going on. The officer I was with, Phil, checked some ID on a couple guys and then a call came in for a domestic disturbance on Worthy Street. We drove there and entered the home and it was obvious the woman, Latina, had been hit in the face. Her nose was bleeding and she was crying. Her face was puffy; probably from blows her husband gave her. Her husband had been drinking.

There were empty Bud Light cans all over the living room. Newspapers were scattered around. A baby was crying and a dog was barking, tied up in the kitchen. Phil read her husband his Miranda rights and put handcuffs on him and led him out to the Ford Crown Victoria that we had parked (double parked because there was no available space near this apartment complex).

Phil called for paramedics to come and treat the woman's injuries. With the drunken arrestee in the back seat, handcuffed, and no door handles on the back doors of the squad car, we went back inside. Phil took time to write his report. He sat and filled out a form that said "Crime Report" on the top. He spoke some Spanish and the victim spoke some English. He described the scene when we arrived at the apartment. The time, the situation, the mess in the house, the woman's bloody nose and puffy cheeks. She said her husband got drunk and started throwing things around the room. Then he began to throw things at her.

She showed an ashtray that was thrown at her. She showed a small saucer that was also thrown at her, and in the kitchen there were pieces of silverware on the floor and broken dishes. She was wearing kind of a sandal flip flop pair of footwear and she actually had been cut on her left foot, which Phil wrote down. The husband did not resist arrest. Phil wrote everything down. He doesn't have great handwriting but it is legible. He let me read the report after it was done.

TWO: Investigation and Arrest Reports

When the paramedics arrived the wife was much more calm because her husband was out of the house; she no longer felt threatened. She held the baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket because there was a chill in the house. A window had been broken at some time, not necessarily this particular evening. The wife was asked to lay back on the sofa so the paramedics could attend to her. She put the baby into a crib and it started crying again. Phil walked around the house and looked for weapons in plain view that the arrestee may have had. He mentioned that searches by police have to be justified and that without a search warrant he could not just go rummaging through personal belongings in the apartment. He found a Smith and Wesson that was not loaded on a counter in the kitchen. I wondered if I should actually be in the house during all of this and Phil said it was up to him to determine that and he felt it would be okay as long as I didn't interfere or become part of the problem.

A police officer must obviously look at things from many perspectives, as many as he can, given the intensity and immediacy of his duties. An officer knows that he will be accountable for everything that happens during the investigation, the arrest procedure, the aftermath and more. When something goes wrong in the process of making an arrest or investigating a reported crime or a crime scene, he has to document very carefully what he did, why he did it, and what happened as a result.

Phil let me see what he wrote in his report. "This is the second time I have been in this residence at 1244 Worthy St. Apartment 21. Police were called here in August of this year I believe. The door was partly open when I arrived at 8:23 P.M. Thursday October 18 and I heard loud voices inside so I entered. The female was crying and bleeding from her nose. The male was staggering around the living room speaking Spanish and appearing to be under the influence. When I saw the injuries to the female I had probably cause to believe the wounds resulted from domestic violence so I made an arrest and handcuffed the suspect and read him his rights in Spanish (from my own Spanish-English book that I carry) and in English. He was removed to the squad car. He smelled of strong alcohol and there were empty beer cans strewn about the living room of the small apartment.

"I heard the sound of a baby crying so I went into the bedroom with the female. A very young baby was in a crib. The mother picked her up and held her so she stopped crying. The child did not appear to have been harmed in any way. An unloaded weapon was found in the kitchen and I took possession of the Smith & Wesson 32 caliber handgun. Paramedics were called to the apartment to treat the injuries to the female. One of the paramedics was Latina, and she translated; the female (Ms. Garcia) was married to the suspect but says she divorced him last year due to his violent episodes and his drinking and drug use, according to the translation from the Paramedic.

Witness Report:

"A neighbor in a nearby apartment knocked on the door and said she had witnessed the female being harmed by the suspect more than once. The witness, Alice Mercado, 27, bilingual and employed as a maid in a nearby motel, said she had heard fighting coming from the apartment in the past on many occasions. Sometimes she was afraid to come to see what was happening because the suspect was unpredictable and explosively violent when under the influence of alcohol and crack cocaine, she said. She told this officer that she once had a relationship with the suspect prior to his marriage to her neighbor. She broke off the relationship, she said, when he became involved with drugs. She reported that he smoked marijuana in the house even though she asked him to smoke outside because of the health aspect for a non-smoker, which she said she is. Asked if he had ever harmed her, she hesitated then said he forced her to have sex with him on several occasions, and when she resisted he slapped her repeatedly before having his way with her.

"She did not witness any of the activities on this particular night, but she did hear a disturbance she said, and she was the one who called 911 for help because she knew the past behaviors of the suspect. The neighbor, Ms. Mercado, explained that her friend Ms. Garcia had been encouraged to call police in the past but her ex-husband said he would kill her if she ever notified the police. Mrs. Mercado said that Ms. Garcia changed the lock on the front door but when her ex-husband was drunk and wanted to get in, he found a way, sometimes jimmying the window in the living room and climbing in through it."

Concrete Experience and Abstract Conceptualization (Kolb learning style).

I watched officer Phil go to the suspect in the back of the Crown Victoria and when Phil discovered that the suspect did not have any identification on his person, I watched Phil retrieve the suspect's car keys and go to the 1994 Ford pickup truck in search of the suspect's billfold. Phil found the wallet in the glove compartment and he called in the suspect's driver's license number to his police station.

As I approached all these events unfolding right in front of me, it seemed like it was a bad dream, or a surreal experience in a movie. As I watched the officer handcuff the inebriated suspect, I know I was processing the experience to decide whether or not I wanted to do what Phil does at some time in the future. Through watching him, as per the David Kolb learning strategy, I was approaching the fact that I could approach these actions and activities from a diverging and assimilating perspective.

Diverging (feeling and watching): I have had a broad range of intellectual and social experiences in my life and I am a creative person. So at almost any time I can re-create whatever reality I'm viewing as a play where there are actually actors, a scene, a setting, stage props, dialogue, conflict, irony, a protagonist and probably an antagonist too. I am fascinated with people and not really sure though that I want a career in police work. The investigative part of it fascinates me but I find the grind with low-life people, drunks, drugs, and the whole nasty scene a bit too dark for me to take on a daily basis. My dialectical response to what I saw did not create conflict within me because I can look at a situation and transform it in my mind into a play, as I said earlier, with characters. In this particular play, the officer Phil was the protagonist going about his job in his uniform with his badge and weapon clearly visible.

Obviously the suspect was the antagonist in this scene; I preferred to watch and not do anything, but in any event that was what I was supposed to do. Kolb says humans choose our approach to any task or experience (diverging by feeling and watching or assimilating by watching and thinking, which is what I do pretty often) but I had not thought that through until now. I obviously had an emotional response to the experience and as I thought it through later I realized that I had just immediately grasp the experience, as Kolb relates, in a reflective observation. I preferred to step back from the reality of it in my own consciousness and see it all as a room full of actors playing out the parts that they had been assigned by the director, who was not on site.

My style (Kolb) was to revert to "reflective observation" of the whole scene. I'm not even sure the officer wanted me in the room. I just followed him up the steps and when he was inside and left the door open I stepped in and went into a corner where I would not be in any danger nor would I be in the way. I was feeling, watching, thinking but not doing; my logical sense clicked in and I saw an abstract event playing out in front of me, not for my benefit, but that I was allowed to be an audience member and be able to objectively observe what was happening while not becoming emotionally or physically involved in it. Was I engaged in a converging learning experience? I do like to experiment with new ideas and I like to stimulate others with thoughts and ideas that come into my creative mind. But I would not say I was an accommodating person in the sense of being a "hands on" person in any learning situation. I like to study what is going on, make creative little stories in my head about how these individuals came to be in this place at this time doing these things.

When the poor wife of the suspect in apartment number 21 was crying and bleeding I was thinking what a great talent she would be showing if this were really a play in a theater somewhere. But that was just me, assimilating (watching and thinking -- a concrete experience and an abstract conceptualization of that experience) the situation and just as quickly my mind clicked back to the horror of the moment for that poor woman who got punched in the nose. We don't know whether she threw a frying pan at him or hit him first, because he wasn't saying and he didn't appear to be hurt. But in any event when a man beats up on a woman, there is something very tragic about that and I revert to my abstract conceptualization of the scene whenever I want to in my mind, and it is both surreal and hurtful.

The smell of stale beer and of cigarette smoke in the room made me think of a dive bar near where I lived going to college; there were fights in that bar every week and the police had to come in often and haul drunks and fighters away with those plastic hand cuffs securing their wrists behind their backs. So when I entered the room immediately my brain lurched back to those days in that dive bar -- the smell was very familiar to me -- and I bantered around in my mind about whether the suspect had gotten himself drunk in a bar like that before coming over here to apartment number 21 to beat up his ex-wife. I wondered in my abstract conceptualization if he had maybe a shot or two of cheap bourbon in addition to all those beers he likely drank. I even conceptualized that he would be hung over in the morning -- but would he immediately light up a cigarette before he brushed his teeth like an old roommate of mine used to do? Foolish ideas come into my brain because I am good at integrating the reality in front of me with a series of actors I pretend are really playing out this scene.

Technical Report Writing -- Watching and Thinking

I asked Phil if I could look at his technical report when he got it completed. He said it would be the next day before he got to finish it. He said he would let me look at another report he wrote where there was violence used. "Technical reports are totally unavailable to the public," he said, "so legally I can't let you see it. But since I know your dad and your family, I'll let you look at partly because the case has already gone to trial and the suspect is in state prison. He said he was letting me look partly because "I know you to be a serious young man..." And the next day I met Phil for coffee on his break and he showed me the report.

"The 911 emergency call came in about 11:14 A.M. On Thursday, April 12, 2007. The dispatcher radioed that there was a bank robbery in progress, ordering me to proceed to the Bank of America 1800 9th Street. I turned on my flashing red lights and my siren and hurried to the scene. I kept constant radio contact with the dispatcher. Our sheriff's technology did not allow me to broadcast my pursuit to other law enforcement but the dispatcher put the broadcast out to all area law enforcement. Upon arrival I observed a dark green four door Dodge or Plymouth driving very rapidly out of the parking lot beside the Bank of America; tires were smoking from the hurried. A security guard was standing in front of the main door to the bank and wildly gesturing towards that fleeing automobile. I radioed the information and called for backup as I followed the green car at speeds up to 70 miles per hour on city streets. The suspects (two men in the car) made a right turn into a one-way street in a residential neighborhood and I pursued close behind. I used my loudspeaker to order the driver to stop the car. Only when a Sears service van backed out in the path of the fleeing suspects did they alter their path. They drove the car up onto a lawn and tried to go around several trees but slammed into one of the trees.

"Both suspects jumped out of the car, one was carrying a gray item that I presumed was a bag with the stolen money from the bank. I pulled my service revolver and ran after the suspect that was running to the back of an old Victorian home. The two ran in opposite directions. The suspect I was pursuing tripped over a garden rake and fell in the grass. He saw that I was approaching him on the run and he pulled what appeared to be a weapon from his pocket and pointed it my direction. I had my revolver in my hand fired a shot aimed at his center mass. The shot hit him. He fell again. As he started to run he collapsed back to the garden dire; I seized his arms and handcuffed him quickly. He was slightly built, with swarthy skin color and black hair. I could see he was bleeding and I had already called for back up so I called for an ambulance and again gave the description of the other suspect who had run behind houses on the other side of the street.