Essay about Role of Police Reports In the Law

Enforcement Community
A discourse community is a community that shares common
goals, language, and genres. Law enforcement officers belong to
their own discourse community in which they are united in their
overall purpose: to protect and serve. An oath they take when
sworn in as officers. Law enforcement officers seem to speak a
common language that, to a civilian, is foreign. We’ve all heard
the famous “10-4” comment for “understood” or “got it” on
police shows and in action movies. Pretty much everything that
comes out of an on-duty officer’s mouth is in some sort of code.
One important genre in the law enforcement community is police
reports. Police reports are the standardize way of reporting and
are often the same in all states. Police reports are…show more
content…
A theft report, according to Deputy Smith, is often reported by the victim or the representative of a
business that has been the target of a theft. A theft report, unlike the missing person incident report,
is a report of criminal activity and is often called an offense report. Certain information, such as,
property taken and the price of the property taken, is collected to help build a criminal case. The
monetary value of the stolen property determines the charge (Smith). Deputy Smith states that
both, a missing person report and a theft report, are generated using a system called National
Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Based on information found on the National Archive
of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), NIBRS is part of a Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program
in which criminal activity is reported. Incident-based data contains a large amount of complex data
that has details about every crime or incident reported (National Incident-Based Reporting System
Resource Guide) (Smith). Standard information is collected for every police report. This
information consists of the reportee’s name and contact information, time and place of incident or
crime, victim’s information, responding officer’s name and badge number, and the officer’s
narrative, which is the description of incident (Smith). According to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s website,