Well when he got there she didn’t have a sign around her neck stating she was an Alzheimer’s patient. He had no idea. After the first few rounds he realized there was something wrong and it just wasn’t grief that was causing the confusion. It took quite a while before her daughter could get there. I think at some point he just started to tell her that everything was fine and he was just waiting with her until her daughter came home.
Yes everything gets documented. You never know what might be important later on. You get so many calls that without a report you would only remember the really unusual ones. I was called to testify in a civil trial for a minor fenderbender that was two years old. No way I remembered it. I could only go by what was on the report. You have to be very detailed because you never know what report is going to be looked at later by lawyers or other agencies. We had a few medical calls that went undocumented. We used to do that. If there was no police action, only a transport to the hospital by the ambulance, we wouldn’t write a report. Then a couple of times something that started out looking like a minor medical problem ended in death at the hospital. When the medical examiner attempted to follow up with the department there was no report. Now we have to document every stubbed toe. No foul play (or fowl play as I have seen it in more than one report) was found during those investigations.
I’ve been on ten years now. I have to say the paperwork is much easier now because of computers. Yes computers existed ten years ago but we were still handwriting all our reports. On each page you had to duplicate the information. On the top of the investigation report you had to fill out victim’s name, date of birth, address, ssn… suspects name, DOB, address, ssn… On the property report you had to fill in the victims name… you get the idea. It was very time consuming. Now we have to fill in everyones personal information once. The system populates whatever field that needs the information. If that person was in a previous report all the information is already there and we just have to verify it. That is very important for someone like me who has horrible handwriting and I’m a two fingered (and sometimes the thumb) typist.
Just about to hit submit. Just wanted to add that there are laptops in the cars so most of the reports are done while we are out on the road, ready to take the next call. I try to knock out the reports as soon as I finish the call so I don’t have it pending when I go to the next one.
I spend too much time here as it is. I don’t want to have to tend to an askthe thread. I answer questions as best I can when they come up. I can also ignore them if I don’t feel like getting into a particular topic and they are usually answered by someone else. I don’t want to start an askthe thread.
Besides there already was one. Former member Badge did an ask the cop thread a while ago. I tried to find it but the search function went all squirrely on me. I can’t remember how good the content was.
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Thanks for the posts, all. It sounds (mostly from Loach) that absolutely everything you do gets documented - is that the case? I’m guessing it’s just an accountability thing?
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From my position as a prosecutor, accouintability takes a back seat to reports to educate me and document the events for court. Even if an incident doesn’t appear o be headed for court, I look at old reports of individuals to find out what kind of patterns emerge about someone’s behavior. Reports seem to be a pain in the butt for most officers, but to me they are extremely important and a poorly written one can make my job a nightmare.
That is the basic reason. You never know when you are going to wind up on the stand with a shitty report in your hand from a call you didn’t think was important at the time.
One good thing about the computer system we have now, I can read every report. When sent to a call I can easily look up any previous reports from that address or person. During the week I read everyones reports to get a feel for what is going on in town. It also gives me good leasons in how not to write reports.
I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but here those little notebooks you see cops using are legal documents subject to a myriad of rules, and they have to be carefully catalogued and stored away when full and the cop starts a new one.
Nah. I just throw mine out. The only thing I write down in there is a persons personal information, name, date of birth etc. Everything else only gets written in the report. I make sure my notebook is destroyed because it has things like social security numbers in it. If I wrote any information in my notebook it would be discoverable. Thats why I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does. It’s just as easy to put the information directly into the report.
People tend to base their views on what they see. Just because you don’t see things happening doesn’t mean they’re not. Even in our small town (1500 people?) the police blotter for the month has dozens and dozens of things.
If you aren’t dealing with the police then things are going well for you. When you deal with them you might have been in an accident, been the victim of a burglary, or have a warrant out for your arrest, things like that.
For those of you who are interested, there’s a great book out there called 10-8 - A Cop’s Honest Look at Life on the Street by Officer X (he’s a cop in one of the suburbs of Chicago who wished to remain anonymous) that is really, really good read - it’s his thoughts as he’s policing - his experiences and observations and it’s all honest to god truth, whether it reflects well or badly on himself and fellow policmen. It was written in the 90’s, but it is still relevant. And again, a really really good read.
Loach, if I can ask you one more question, is how do you and other cops actually get motivated to actually get out and do things?
I can imagine that if I didn’t have any particular direction or something that needed to get done that day, I would sit around all day surfing The Dope till something came in over the radio. Humans being naturally lazy, I can imagine this happening to a lot of people.
What makes you decide to go, “fly the flag,” and such? Is there a supervisor that generally keeps tabs on how you dispose of your time on shift? Are other measures like traffic tickets used as proxies for policing, “effeciency?”
For me, it’s mostly because I just want to do a good job. I enjoy just patrolling around town, listening to the radio and looking out for something that needs my attention. If you’re proactive, you can dig up a lot of excitement by yourself instead of waiting for a call.
I admit there are days when I just don’t feel like working, but I still get out there. I may raise the bar on what sort of traffic violations are worth stopping, however.
As a supervisor, I rarely have to do anything to get my troops out working. We don’t have any sort of quotas - we just expect them to go out and do the job.
We do have laptops in the cars but the wireless functions are locked up except for transmitting reports. Otherwise I might be temped to dope all day. Sometimes there is no need to self motivate, the calls come in right after another. Some are lazy, some are motivated. Although there are no quotas where I work they do expect you to work. They want tickets so we give them tickets. Most write 10-15 a month. Some write more. To keep motivated it is probably a good idea to move around the department a bit. It is easy to get burnt out in patrol after a number of years. A change of scenery to detectives or somewhere else is a good idea every now and then.
This topic, like real estate, is about three things: location, location, and location. I live in Baltimore, and the cops here have plenty to keep them busy from the start of the shift until the end. Living here, it would barely even occur to me to ask “What does a cop do all day?”
A couple of month ago i was driving the beautifully scenic Route 100 in Vermont, and i went through one of those idyllic little New England towns without noticing the change in speed limits. Sure enough, out popped a cop and pulled me over. He was extremely friendly, and let me off with a warning after checking out my license etc. As i drove off, it crossed my mind that half his life probably consists of stopping rubbernecking tourists speeding through his town. Probably not really true, but it didn’t seem that there was a lot else going on there.
Back in Australia, my stepfather retired from the police force at the rank of Inspector, and from what he’s told me a lot of the job is paperwork. This is especially true once you start to move up the ranks, but even regular cops fill out a lot of reports. Another friend, who is a pretty middle-to-high-ranking cop in the Washington DC Metro police, also says that admin and paperwork take up a lot of his time.
In Australia, i was speaking once with a guy who had been a cop in some small country towns. He said that one of the hardest things about being a rural cop was enforcing the law while also remaining friendly with the locals. If a rural cop gets a reputation for being a hard-ass who enforces every little traffic violation, he can soon find that no-one in town will talk to him. On the other hand, if he takes things to easy, then people with lose respect for him and his authority. He said that one of the biggest problems he had was trying to convince people that driving home loaded after a night at the pub was unacceptable, even if their fathers had done it all their lives.