zlacker

I recently led the project completely rewriting the incident reporting system for one of the top 3 (by size) police departments in the country. This report wouldn't have even come close to passing client-side (or server-side for that matter) validations upon submission. An incident classified as a death with no medical information submitted? Usually the systems have some basic checks in place to ensure that, for example, if a theft occurred, property marked as stolen is present in the report. Likewise for any incident with some sort of physical harm: there's always a medical incident listed too. And a (nearly) blank narrative?! Even if that's due to Louisville PD policy, it still wouldn't have flown in the city I worked in. A simple assault (not battery, no injury) on public transit where the offender ran away and nobody could identify them would've produced a more thorough report than this one.

If this is standard in Louisville and there are no safeguards in their reporting software, stringent incident reporting software ought to be added to the list of reforms we ask of them.

>>Meegul+(OP)
The nearly blank narrative is listed under the header “public narrative”. Many departments use this to separate out the actual narrative from what can be immediately provided to the public (often just a sentence or two). So, there’s a possibility the full narrative was withheld as it’s an active investigation.

It’s also not uncommon practice for initial report narratives to be somewhat anemic when the follow-up investigation is immediate. Homicides being a perfect example where, in many agencies, all the useful details beyond “found dead guy” are in the murder book (i.e. case notes) outside of RMS.