Police agencies are like military organizations, with a recognizable chain of command. Unlike a private business where you may have to make several calls to find the right person to help you, in a law enforcement agency you can go right to the source of the problem and above it if necessary.
Typically, a police or sheriff’s department is staffed from the bottom to the top: officers (or deputies), sergeants, lieutenants, captains, commanders, deputy chiefs (or assistant sheriffs), and the chief (or sheriff).
Correcting Report Errors
In most traffic collision cases, you'll want to clarify portions of the officer's report (witness statements, directions, road conditions, etc.), ask more questions about certain issues (vehicle damage, injuries, etc.), and/or correct any obvious errors in the report. While the first two matters may go without a hitch, the last one can be like opening a hornet's nest with a shovel. Officers will rarely admit publicly that they made a mistake on a traffic collision report. Before you jump to any conclusions about their self-serving ego-protection, keep a few other related factors in mind:
- Most officers would rather fight armed gangs barehanded than admit one of their reports is factually incorrect. Completed police reports can take on the appearance of stone monuments. Once the report leaves the officer's hands, is approved by his or her supervisor, and heads to the Records Division dungeon, it becomes very difficult to retrieve, correct, and resubmit. This, however, should be the officer's problem and not yours. If you discover a bona fide error in any police report, you have the right, as the client's advocate, to request that the report be redone.
- The error-correction process makes nuclear physics appear simple. Because most police agencies want their officers to do it right the first time, they make report-error correcting a tedious and time-consuming process. Again, this is not your worry, but rather the officer's. Just be aware that the steps to fix errors can take days or even weeks in some cases. First, the officer must retrieve the original copy of the old report from the Records Division; then he or she must show the offending report to a ranking supervisor and point out the error or errors that need correction.
- The officer must rewrite the original report. Armed with approval from above, the officer must go back to the scene (in the case of traffic collision report mistakes) or go back to his or her field notebook to review and rewrite the entire report. With the errors corrected, the officer resubmits both reports for review and approval, along with a separate narrative that ex plains how and why he or she came to see these errors (from your phone call) and why they were corrected.
- The whole package goes back to Records for resorting and refiling. This means it could sit in an in-basket for two days or two weeks while it waits to go back into the "system." Be prepared to wait for results. Between phone calls chasing the officer down and delays surrounding the resubmittal process, it could take you one month or longer to get a copy of the amended report. Stick to your guns, though. If you're right, you're right, and you should expect the officer to make changes to reflect the truth. Just don't think this whole procedure will take place overnight.
This entire process can either go smoothly or bog down in seemingly endless delays. Much depends on the police agency and on your personal relationship with someone there. If you find that you're playing rounds and rounds of "telephone tag" or are getting little if any help or movement from the officer, don't be shy about going over his or her head.
If you're having problems working with an officer on a report or some other client-related matter, ask to speak to his or her immediate supervisor, the sergeant. If you don't get satisfaction after a reasonable amount of waiting, go over the sergeant's head to the lieutenant, and so on. Someone somewhere will light a fire under someone else and your problem will get some attention.
Remember that far more than those in most professions, law enforcement officers stick together through thick and thin. Helping you show that another officer was wrong is not something most officers will leap to do, but they will do their job if you explain why it must be done.
Handling Difficult Cases
With few exceptions, police officers are humane, caring folks who only want to do their jobs safely and effectively and go home in one piece at the end of the day. Notice that the phrase "their jobs" does not include the phrase "your job" anywhere in it. They probably will not work at breakneck speed to assist you. Your concerns and your responsibilities to your law firm are not their top priority. They will do their jobs and be as professional as they can, but some cases are significantly more trying and emotionally difficult than others.
Sometimes it's difficult for police officers to conceal or control their true feelings during difficult cases: murders of young women or children, murders of fellow cops, hideously violent rapes, child-related abuse or molestation cases, fatal accidents involving children, etc.
If you work for a criminal defense firm, a personal injury firm, or a civil litigation firm that handles high-profile arrests, traffic death cases, or police civil suits, be prepared to face a wide range of emotions when you deal with the officers involved. Here's a case that illustrates how these emotions can affect you as a paralegal.
In 1988, in San Diego, California, patrol officers responded to an "officer needs help" call to find an SDPD officer fatally shot in the head after he had run after some drug-dealing gang members. The suspects fled into the night, thereby initiating an intense manhunt to find the dead officer's killer. By the time the shooting suspect was captured the next day, over 250 officers had participated in the case. Each officer wrote a short report that documented his or her activities-traffic control, scene protection, SWAT work, command post mo bile van operations, etc.
When the case came to trial over three years later, the defense attorney assigned to handle the shooting suspect's case subpoenaed all of the officers on the scene as possible defense witnesses. As the trial date approached, officers were told by their department to call the defense attorney's paralegal staff and advise their status (vacation, days off, etc.) for the trial.
Imagine the hostility, overt and covert, these paralegals encountered as they spoke with each of these several hundred obviously upset police officers. Most of the officers were at least polite as they "checked in" with the defendant's attorney, but you know some of them could not contain their anger or resentment and took it out on the paralegals assigned to monitor their participation in the case.
As you handle difficult or highly charged cases involving death, injury, children, sex crimes, etc., try to keep your perspective and that of the officers involved in the back of your mind. Don't personalize any negative feelings they may have toward you just because you're trying to do a complete and professional job.
There are an estimated 523,000 police officers in this country. Make friends with a few of them if you can. Always strive to build a professional rapport with certain officers who can give you valuable assistance. If they know they can trust you as a fair person who will not try to humiliate them, trick them, or belittle their efforts, you'll reap a wide range of information and assistance.
