One of the things never covered on TV police shows is the drudgery of paperwork. Starsky and Hutch get in a high speed chase, wreck half a dozen cars, shoot three crooks and go on their merry way. The viewer never sees paper and pen in close proximity to one another. If only.
Paperwork is the bane of police officers. Dishonest police chiefs and idiot dispatchers add to the burden. I checked out with dispatch for a bathroom break. The dispatcher issued a case number. Once issued, the case number couldn’t be taken back. I had to write a report. The report is forty years old. If it still exists, you will find a detailed description of my efforts. Date, time, place, effort expended and the result. If I’d had a camera, there would have been pictures.
The perverted Chief that sent me to the task force decided to pad police activity statistics. He decreed that a request for a registration check would require a report for a suspicious vehicle.
I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he blew the entire budget for Polaroid film, taking dirty pictures of a titty dancer dispatcher. His office fixtures were featured prominently in the background.
Texas Department of Public Safety extorted 5 million dollars from Byrnes Grant funds to deliver a unified reporting system for DPS Narcotics and all narcotics task force units.
It was called CLERIS. I referred to it as Clitoris, because it was difficult to manipulate to anybody’s satisfaction. A case report that previously took 8 hours to write and assemble now took 40 hours with the CLERIS system.
Not all reports are created equal. I would have volunteered to write the report (at the link) detailing the incident described.
Properly documented there is a cornucopia of crimes. Florida cops came up with 17. The included the usual, animal cruelty, assault, aggravated assault, attempted murder. At this point the reporter got distracted and stopped listing the offenses.
That is unfortunate, we’ll never know if the cops alleged that she used a deadly weapon, the hamster. Here is an opportunity to have a hamster be declared a deadly weapon. A deadly weapon is determined by the manner and use of an object to inflict injury or death. Imagine getting on the witness stand to describe the dead rodent, dressed in his cute cupid costume, and doing it with a deadpan straight face. Now that’s acting!
