The Power of the Pen — to Put You in Jail!
Sometimes a thoughtless act can have devastating consequences far surpassing anything imagined at the time. There are all kinds of ways of unintentionally crossing the line. The very nature of your job creates a minefield to maneuver through each day. Take report writing, for instance.
An Orange County deputy sheriff found out the hard way about exploding reports. According to the press, the deputy was assigned to do followups on 39 property crime cases. He was supposed to contact the victims on each case and determine their willingness to cooperate in situations where DNA might result in solving the crime. Apparently, he decided to take a few shortcuts. In 18 of the 39 cases, he wrote that he had contacted the victim and they didn’t care to cooperate. He hadn’t, but what did it matter? It was just a report.
Getting criminally prosecuted undoubtedly never crossed his mind. Unfortunately, after he handed in the 39 follow-up reports, some of them began to unravel. For instance, one of the victims who he wrote about interviewing and who he had written had declined to cooperate turned out to be dead. That was bad luck for both of them. In the end, the district attorney filed 18 misdemeanor counts against the deputy. He took a jury trial and was convicted of eight of the counts. This was an unexpected end to a 10-year career.
It behooves anyone who puts a pen to an official report to know about 118.1 PC.
118.1. False statements in crime reports; Penalties
Every peace officer who files any report with the agency which employs him or her regarding the commission of any crime or any investigation of any crime, if he or she knowingly and intentionally makes any statement regarding any material matter in the report which the officer knows to be false, whether or not the statement is certified or otherwise expressly reported as true, is guilty of filing a false report punishable by imprisonment in the county jail for up to one year, or in the state prison for one, two, or three years. This section shall not apply to the contents of any statement which the peace officer attributes in the report to any other person.
This should give you pause every time you put pen to paper. Writing a report may be the most important thing you do, short of testifying. Any time you put something into the report thoughtlessly, or under an assumption or without carefully checking the facts, you may open yourself up to unexpected consequences. The ultimate goal in writing a report should always be accuracy.
The problem is compounded by the Department’s current emphasis on reducing overtime. Before an investigation is complete, the original unit is often ordered to go end of watch and pass the rest of the investigation off to another unit to avoid overtime. Does the second unit really understand everything that the first unit did? They’d better, or the report will not be accurate. And that is the first step in what could turn out to be a disaster.
Another unofficial Department procedure that could lead to disaster is the “designated finder” concept. To reduce overtime, officers in narcotics and gang units executing search warrants may be encouraged to have one officer be the official finder of all the evidence. This means that only one officer will have to go to court. This is fraught with danger since the property report reads as if only one officer was at the scene searching. While it may be true that this officer was directed to all the found evidence and officially seized it, cross-examination in court months later can get pretty tricky (and dangerous to one’s career). Don’t expect the Department’s gratitude over the overtime you saved to protect you.
If you have the misfortune to be involved in a situation that gets blown into a media event, things get even more critical. Take the Rodney King incident, for example. The reports written in that incident before the Holiday video tape became known to the media were eventually blown up into four-foot-by-six-foot exhibits to be displayed in front of the jury as prosecutors beat up the officers on the stand over every seeming inconsistency in the report that could be imagined.
A few years later came the Rafael Perez scandal. The prosecutors brought Rafael Perez a stack of hundreds of arrest reports to look at to tell them which were false arrests. Perez had a field day in his attempt to draw focus away from his crimes. Every report that Perez selected was scrutinized by teams of IA investigators to find inconsistencies on which to send officers to Boards of Rights. Most officers were cleared, but the experience wasn’t any fun. Who would have thought in 1998 that reports written in 1995 would be subject to such intense inspection?
Don’t let carelessness, assumptions or inaccuracy affect your long-term career goals when you pull that pen out of your pocket. When you turn that report in, hear warning bells. Like a bullet, once fired it can’t be brought back. So, like you do when you fire a bullet, strive for accuracy!
Be legally careful out there.
