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.