It was a serious question, and it drew a serious answer. It just
took a minute for it to get there.
It was a serious question, and it drew a serious answer. It just took a minute for it to get there.
The subject during the final hour of Wednesday’s class of the seventh Hollister Citizens Police Academy was preserving crime scene evidence.
Officer David Godoy had just told the class that, in their zeal to attend to a victim’s wounds, emergency medical personnel will sometimes walk through a pool of blood, possibly tainting the vital evidence.
Up went my hand.
“If you guys got there first, couldn’t you station an officer next to a pool of blood or a shell casing to just stand there and direct traffic?”
Godoy paused, and for a second he looked just like Sylvester when confronted by Granny while holding Tweety Bird in his mouth.
“Well,” he said, “if this were a regular police force…”
Ten seconds of solid laughter ensued.
The 32 field officers of the Hollister Police Department, Godoy explained, aren’t like cops on big-city forces – say, the LAPD, who, Godoy said, have been known to arrive en masse at a crime scene, wrap it in yellow police tape and then relax while detectives do the work. It’s different in Hollister. Those 32 officers, not to mention their superiors, are Jacks and Janes of all trades.
Godoy said at law enforcement conferences, officers from more “sophisticated” forces will look curiously at an HPD officer when discussing investigation procedures.
“They say, ‘How do you know that?'” Godoy said. “‘You’re not supposed to know that!'”
The ratio of approximately one HPD officer on the streets at any given time per 10,000 residents has made it necessary that they do.
But we’d strayed a bit from the subject, report writing – unquestionably the most boring aspect of police work. At the same time, it’s what takes up the vast majority of a cop’s work day. Statistically, 80 percent of any officer’s time on the job is spent writing reports – something you won’t see on “C.O.P.S.”
It seems like a waste of time compared to catching bad guys, but Godoy, a 10-year HPD veteran, put it in a nutshell: “If an officer doesn’t write it down, it never happened,” he said. “Period, end of story.”
Writing a report, believe it or not, is also the toughest aspect of police work that rookies must learn. Even though four weeks are spent at the police academy on report writing, more recruits get washed out for poor reports than for any other reason.
“You almost have to be an English major to a point,” Godoy said. “You’ve got to know spelling, grammar – you’ve got to be an editor.”
Even penmanship counts. Capt. Bob Brooks said he once circulated a memo through the department that read, “It appears some of you have dropped out of medical school and decided to become police officers.”
“Thank god we started using laptops,” Brooks said. “It was getting pretty bad.”
In court, a good defense attorney can pick apart an officer – and thus, a case – for an incomplete or inaccurate report. Godoy, who receives most of his “attaboys” from the department for his reports and instructs young officers in how to write them, learned the hard way – as many do.
“I got on the stand a couple of times,” he said, “and I’d remember something that happened, but I didn’t write it down. The attorneys tore me apart.”
An officer spends 15 to 20 minutes on the average call. Writing the report can take an hour to 90 minutes. Usually, it’s done during slow patrol periods.
“When you see officers parked behind Gold’s Gym with their heads down,” Godoy said, “they’re looking at their laptop.”
Reports are a minimum of three pages. Two are devoted to minute details gleaned from interviews with the subjects of a call and any witnesses, plus the officer’s own observations of the scene. At least one more page is for the officer’s narrative of what happened.
The more detailed the report, the better the chance of making the charges stick. And that, after all, is what police work is about – getting the bad guys off the streets.
Sworn to uphold the law, often tied up by it
Sgt. James “Arnie” Weathers threw his keys at me during Wednesday’s class. Assault charges will not be pressed, though.
In the first place, he missed by a good six feet. It was a waste pitch, the kind you’d throw to Ken Griffey Jr. on an 0-2 count with two outs and nobody on base.
In the second place, he was making a point. I’d inquired about the difference between assault and battery during the segment on the laws of arrest and search and seizure. To illustrate it, Weathers chucked the half-speed, jingling fastball.
Come to find out, assault is the intent to inflict bodily harm. If harm is inflicted, it’s battery. So it’s a good thing Weathers has good aim.
The different criminal codes – penal, vehicle and civil – of the State of California are compiled in dictionary-sized volumes with every conceivable crime duly entered, from felonies to misdemeanors to infractions.
But the law isn’t always literally interpreted.
“Funny thing about judges,” said Weathers, a 7-year HPD veteran with two years as a sergeant. “Judges interpret (laws) their own way. We’ve got to work within the gray area.”
The difficulty lies in that police officers, while sworn to uphold the law, are often tied up by it.
The Miranda Bill of Rights, introduced in the early 1960s, took away – rightfully so – an officer’s ability to use any method he deemed necessary to effect an arrest. Such things as coerced confessions became a thing of the past with Miranda, which protects the rights of the accused – “Because the innocent don’t need them,” as Sgt. Joe Friday was so fond of saying on “Dragnet.”
Oddly enough, a “Dragnet” episode aired Thursday on Nick At Nite’s TV Land depicted the frustration officers can go through. Sgt. Joe Friday and his sidekick, Bill Gannon, had arrested three men for stealing car stereos. But the case was thrown out of court because the stolen stereos were found in the trunk of the suspects’ car when Friday and Gannon stopped them for rolling a red light on a right turn. The car fit the description given by a witness near the crime scene, Friday had observed suspicious behavior by one of the suspects while in the car and the officers were within their rights to search the suspects for weapons after stopping them.
But the judge ruled – “The court is forced to rule,” he put it – that the stereos were not admissible as evidence since Friday and Gannon could not have expected, within reason, to find the stolen stereos in the trunk, even though probable cause had been established.
That’s part of the “gray area” Weathers spoke of.
“Anybody confused between probable cause and reasonable suspicion?” he asked. “I think I am.”
He was kidding. If an officer has probable cause, he can arrest a suspect. If he has reasonable suspicion – more of a judgment call – the officer can hold the suspect for questioning.
In search and seizure, there’s something known as the “good faith exception,” which Weathers said isn’t commonly used in court.
“Say I make a traffic stop,” he said. “I start writing the ticket and I run the vehicle’s license. The dispatcher says there’s a warrant out on the driver, so I search him before I take him to jail and find drugs or a gun. I’m all happy now because I’ve got a great felony arrest.” But then, because of a clerical error or a goof by the dispatcher, it’s discovered that there was no warrant for the driver’s arrest. In such a case, the contraband would not normally be admissible as evidence because it was found during an “illegal” search. A judge, however, may rule that since the officer believed the search to be legal – because he was told about the warrant – the evidence is admissible and the case goes to court.
And, yes, you can make a citizen’s arrest. But police will strongly advise you to think twice before trying it.
Any citizen can make an arrest for any public offense if it’s committed in their presence. In the case of a felony, a citizen need not witness the crime if he or she has probable cause to believe it was committed.
The suspect must be immediately taken to a peace officer or judge and they must accept the arrest. They can then book, cite or release the suspect, and here’s the catch: the officer and his agency are released from liability. The citizen isn’t.
There are other caveats.
“Do not use physical restraint. Leave that to us,” Weathers said. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re going to get hurt. You don’t know what this person has; you don’t know if they’re armed. It’s not worth it.
“Just be a good witness – a very good witness,” he added. “That’s the best thing you can do.”
