Investigating Gaps in Police Narratives

Report writing is a major form of communication in the law enforcement; hence, professional writing skills are mandatory among the police. Though empirical studies suggest that police officers are confronted with inadequate report writing skills, little is known about how the report writing difficulties of the police manifest in their written narratives. Hence, using qualitative inquiry, this study analyzed, described, and interpreted the gaps or errors in written police narratives. One hundred twenty (120) police blotter narratives written by police investigators in three municipal police stations were analyzed to look into errors in grammar, mechanics, and lexis. Findings revealed that grammatical gaps are composed of errors on sentence construction, verb usage, connective, pronoun, plural noun, and preposition; mechanical gaps include errors on punctuation, capitalization, and spelling; and lexical gaps are inappropriate word choice and improper word form. These findings offer manifold academic and professional intervention ideas that would help address the report writing issues among the police.