Final Blog

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Throughout the past semester, I have learned a lot in my Writing in Disciplines class. The material covered in class was not foreign to me at the beginning already, but I have learned how to polish my skills as a writer that will help me later in life in my professional career as a police officer and hopefully as an FBI agent. The main lesson I have learned in this class was to keep my opinions out of police writing. Through using the Documentary Project and the mock interview, I have learned how important it is to keep personal opinions out of professional writing.
For the Documentary Project, I chose the film Blackfish which is about the controversy of keeping captured killer whales in captivity. The assignment was that I had to summarize the film with only using the facts given in the film. We were not supposed to include personal opinion within the summary but it was more difficult than I had thought it would be. For me, when I write a paper, I just write nonstop for as long as my mind will let it and then I will go back over it and edit it. When I got done with my initial binge writing, I went back over it and had to edit pretty much everything because it had small indications of my personal opinion on the horrible subject... see I did it just there. It is hard to not speak your opinion because it is apart of human nature to express there opinions to communicate with one another. However, all said and done, I was able to correct my paper and turn it in with as little, if any, personal opinion in it. Police writing and report writing has to include nothing but the facts, there is no room for opinions. That is why I think after completing the Documentary Project, I have acquired the proper skills to minimize my opinion sharing within my professional writings.
    The mock interview was a fun little assignment when we, as a group, had to interview a member of the other group about a made-up crime. My group came out swinging automatically accusing the suspect of the crime based off of the opinions that we had already got the perpetrator. Granted it did make for a humorous and entertaining interview, it was not the proper way an officer should handle an interview, which I now know. It is important for a police officer to go into an interview, or even an interrogation with an open mind, completely opinion free. No matter how much the officer dislikes the suspect, the officer must treat them with respect in order to receive respect. Having the opinion that the suspect being interviewed is the one that actually committed the crime at the beginning of the interview process creates an unfair and unconstitutional bias. Everyone is supposed to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. That is why personal opinions should be left out of suspect interviews and interrogations.

Draft of Final Blog

 During the past semester, I have learned a lot about criminal justice writing. Before this class, I never realized how much writing is incorporated with the criminal justice field. Some of the most important qualities within a police officer is his or her ability to write. Every action a police officer does has to be logged in a police report. The most important lessons I have learned from this semester is that police writings have to be very detailed, a correctly sized notebook means a lot in the field, and that search warrants are not as easily requested as the media makes it seem.

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It is important for police writing to be as detailed as possible because if it is not detailed properly. it could ultimately result in a guilty man go free or even have an innocent man be convicted for a crime they did not commit. If a police officer makes a description of a man that is not thoroughly detailed, an innocent person could possibly be mistaken for the real criminal. Likewise, if the description is not precise, the real criminal could go without being caught. During the process of evidence, it is crucial to document everyone who has come into contact with that piece of evidence. Once more, a lot of detailed writings that include date, time, for how long was the evidence in their hands, who held the evidence, where the evidence was found, and a whole bunch of minute details are so important to police writings.
A correctly sized notebook is important for a police officer because if a notebook is too big to carry, it makes it difficult for the officer to take field notes. Consequently, if the notebook is too small, it is equally difficult to write a lot of information in a small notebook. The notebook should have solid covers to give the officer a hard surface to write on, but must also be malleable enough to fit in the officer's pocket. If the officer does not have these qualities in a field notebook, it makes it difficult to write the police report. Before this class, I never would have thought about size and characteristics of notebooks to use.
In the media and television shows, the application for a search warrant takes less than a couple minutes and boom, their in the door of the fugitives home with guns blazing. Real life police life, is not like that at all. In order to get a search warrant, it requires pages and pages of information that describes the location that is going to searched, what the officers are looking for at this location, who should be at the location, and every other detail one can think of. All of this is just the basics, but then the meat of the search warrant application requires extensive details that show the judge that the officers have enough probable cause to search the home or whatever they need to search.
There is so much writing in a police officer's life, it is amazing that one can get a job in this field without holding a Masters Degree in English. Because of this class, I have learned the skill set, or at least understand the skill set, that separates a good officer from a great police officer. It is easy to arrest a person, but it is more difficult to convict a person in this judicial system.

Chapter 6 Concepts

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    Chapter 6 deals with writing police arrest reports. The most important lesson out of this chapter was to be as clear and concise as possible and make sure to include the information that gives the officer probable cause in the report. There are three ways to include probable cause: by using the five senses, by using the officer's training and experience and by using information gained during the coarse of daily activities. Without probable cause, an officer cannot make an arrest. Therefore, it is important to include probable cause within the police report. The rest of the chapter gave examples of police reports such as fill-inn-the-blanks forms and narrative reports. the fill-in-the-blanks form is self-explanatory, there boxes for they have a prescribed question to it and then the officer just fills in the blank. ;The narrative report requires more work on the officer. In the narrative report, the officer must manually write out what happened in chronological order and with as much detail as humanly possible.

Pedro's Experiment

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    My initial thoughts about Pedro's dressing up and then down experiment, was that I was not surprised by the results. I do not think this experiment is strictly about his race. People who dress well, do get treated better regardless about their race. I have noticed that when I dress in all black in skinny jeans and a band shirt with my long hair, people do act differently around me. Workers at stores look at me thinking I am some ordinary kid that is in there to goof off and break items. I specifically remember this one example when I was with two of my friends, all of us were wearing black skinny jeans, band shirt, and with long hair, we were in SEARS at the Louis Joliet Mall looking at beds. At the time, I was actually looking to buy a new bed, so I was sitting on beds as I was walking by, just testing them like everyone does. Then, one of the managers saw me sitting on all the beds and assumed we were goofing off and kicked us out of SEARS for the day. I was shocked when this happened because we were not goofing off any more than an adult would be goofing off, just having fun. I believe since the group of us looked as though we were young teenagers that looked like we were looking for trouble, actually got us into trouble. 

    Now when I dress, I usually wear a pair of blue jeans, a non-offensive band shirt (because I have been told by an elderly lady that one of my band shirts I was wearing was offensive, but that is a story for another day) and a nice jacket because I have noticed that people in stores are more polite to me when I dress like this. I still get some people that think I am a young stoner kid (mainly because I have long hair and I joke around a lot), but they usually realize I clearly do not do drugs once they find out that I am a criminal justice major that has aspirations to land a job in the FBI.  

    Therefore, I think this experiment can be recreated by using any person around the same age and of any race and still have the same outcome. I thought this experiment did a great job in publicizing how people treat others based on how they dress and how easily these same people come to judge others in how they dress. 

Making A Murderer Interviews

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    The Netflix series Making A Murderer shows the story of Steven Avery and the investigation of a murder he was allegedly involved with. Avery's defense was that the Manitowoc County Police Department framed Avery because of his past experiences with the police department. Avery was once convicted of a sexual assault that he was later found to be wrongfully convicted by the same police department. During interviews between the police department and Avery's lawyers, some of the officer's body language showed signs of stress and anxiety. 

    During the interviews, Sheriff Ken Peterson is seen fidgeting in his chair, constantly squeezing his hands, and interlacing his fingers multiple times. These can be taken as sign of stress meaning that he either knew something about the cover-up (if there was one) or that he was one of the officers involved. 

    District Attorney, Mark Rohrer, was interviewed and asked about the important information he allegedly  withheld from giving it to the Sheriff. During his interview, he can be seen as close to shaking like a leaf as humanly possible. His posture constantly changed from leaning forward and back in his chair. He folded his arms, fidgeted his heads, and even scratching his face which is another sign of stress. This can also be taken as he knew about the alleged cover-up and was nervous about getting in trouble. 

    After seeing this scene, I now see how bad posture and hand gestures can lead an interviewer to question ones integrity. In order to prepare for an interview I think it is just best to be honest whether or not that means you will get in trouble or not. It is better to have everyone know you messed up rather than having people debate and get emotional over it, which would make it a bigger deal than it could have been by admitting wrong. 

Notebook Post

A.)

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B.) 

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C.)

 

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I think the best choice of notebook for a police officer would be option A because it is small and durable which makes it ideal for taking notes out in the field. Option B is a regular composition notebook that is typically used as a journal or diary. A composition notebook is simply not tough enough to endure the elements faced by police officers everyday. Option C would be too big of a notebook for a police officer. It would be too big for the officer to carry on his persons when he or she is out of the squad car. These types of notebooks are most commonly used by students and are meant to hold a lot of information but not necessarily meant to be  comfortable to carry. 

Narrative Writing Rewrite

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Information Report
Location: 1647 Rancho, El Fuego
Occurrence Date: 7-25-15
Persons: Tunney, Carol P. DOB 1-21-66
Persons: Tunney, Katherine L. DOB 9-16-89

Details
On 7-25-15 at 1230 I received a radio call to meet reporting party Katherine Tunney at 1230 hours. Upon reaching the address I began by talking with Katherine Tunney. Tunney said she was getting ready to leave her residence at 1215 hours when she saw a white Toyota van wagon stopped in front of her residence in the middle of the street facing westbound. She said the sole occupant of the van was sitting in the seat facing her residence and taking pictures of her residence. From what she could see she described the person in the vehicle as a white male with gray hair.
Tunney made an attempt to confront the person in the van but once she exited her residence the person in the van closed their window and sped off. Tunney was able to see the license plate number. 836L92F. I looked up the license plate in the database and the results came up as a 2004 Toyota Wagon registered to Bond, Stephen D., 3381 El Balazo, El Fuego.
I talked to Katherine Tunney's mother, Carol Tunney, to  get more information about the incident. Carol Tunney said she filed a report in April because a man had approached her while she was planting and asked for her name. Carol responded by asking for his name but the man left after that. Carol saw the license plate. ISPYONU. I ran a license plate check and it came up as a 2008 SAAB registered to Toomey, Richard, 36 Paseo De Bonito, El Rancho.
I told both Carol Tunney and Katherine Tunney that no crime had been committed and the information has been filed.