Plain language, accuracy and objectivity

Priya Sandhu spent five years writing fraud reports for a bank before she enrolled in the program, and she thought report writing would be the easy part. Her first assignment comes back from Professor Desjardins covered in red ink. 'Upon arrival at the location, the writer proceeded to make contact with the complainant, who advised that she had observed an unknown male exiting the premises at a high rate of speed.' He has circled almost every phrase. In the margin he has written: 'I got there and spoke with Ms. Osei. She told me she saw a man run out of the store. Same facts. Half the words. And nobody has to translate.'

Police writing has a reputation for a peculiar language of its own, full of phrases that nobody uses in ordinary speech. This lesson argues that the reputation is deserved but the habit is unnecessary, and often harmful. Reports are read by people who are not police: prosecutors, judges, juries, victims, journalists and the public. Clear, plain writing serves all of them. The lesson then turns to two qualities that matter even more than style: accuracy and objectivity.

Why plain language

Plain language means writing so that the intended reader can find what they need, understand it the first time and use it. It is not simplistic or informal writing. Legal documents, medical instructions and government forms in both countries have moved toward plain language over the past thirty years, because research consistently shows that readers understand plain documents faster and more accurately. The Government of Canada's writing guidelines, and the plain language policies of several provinces, encourage short sentences, familiar words and the active voice. Police agencies have been slower to follow, but many now teach plain language in their academies.

Plain language matters in police reports for practical reasons. A judge reading a report at a bail hearing has a few minutes and many files. A juror must understand the officer's account without any background in policing. A victim reading the report later wants to recognize what happened to them. Jargon also creates risk. Phrases like 'the subject became combative' or 'the male was uncooperative' are vague, and in cross-examination a defence lawyer will ask exactly what they mean. An officer who wrote what actually happened, 'He pulled his arm away and swung his fist at my face', has nothing to explain.

Police jargon and its plain equivalents

Much police jargon comes from an understandable wish to sound official and neutral. Words like 'proceeded', 'observed' and 'advised' feel more formal than 'went', 'saw' and 'told'. But formality adds nothing to accuracy, and longer words make sentences harder to read. The table shows some of the most common examples. Most agencies now prefer the plain versions.

Some terms are genuinely technical and cannot be replaced, such as legal terms ('reasonable grounds', 'warrant', 'recognizance') or the names of specific procedures. Those are fine, provided they are used correctly. The target of plain language is the padding that surrounds them, not precise vocabulary. Abbreviations are another hazard. Officers use dozens of them in notes, but a report should spell out any abbreviation the first time it appears, and avoid the ones a general reader would not know. 'The S/M was located N/B on Pine' may be clear to a colleague; 'I found the suspect walking north on Pine Street' is clear to everyone.

Measuring readability

Readability formulas estimate how hard a text is to read from simple features such as sentence length and word length. The best known is the Flesch Reading Ease score, developed by Rudolf Flesch in the 1940s. It produces a number, usually between 0 and 100, where higher scores mean easier text. Ordinary newspaper writing typically scores somewhere in the fifties or sixties, and many legal and bureaucratic documents score below thirty. The formula is crude, because it knows nothing about meaning, but it is a useful warning sign: a report with very long sentences full of long words is almost always harder to read than it needs to be.

Priya compares her original sentence with Professor Desjardins's rewrite, using a short program that counts words, sentences and syllables and calculates the score. Counting syllables exactly requires a dictionary, so the program uses a simple rule of thumb: it counts groups of vowels in each word, with an adjustment for a silent final 'e'. That is accurate enough for comparing two versions of the same passage.

import re

def syllables(word):
    word = word.lower()
    groups = re.findall(r"[aeiouy]+", word)
    n = len(groups)
    if word.endswith("e") and not word.endswith("le") and n > 1:
        n -= 1                      # silent final e
    return max(n, 1)

def reading_ease(text):
    sentences = max(len(re.findall(r"[.!?]+", text)), 1)
    words = re.findall(r"[A-Za-z']+", text)
    syl = sum(syllables(w) for w in words)
    score = 206.835 - 1.015 * len(words) / sentences - 84.6 * syl / len(words)
    return len(words), sentences, syl, score

original = ("Upon arrival at the location, the writer proceeded to make contact with the "
            "complainant, who advised that she had observed an unknown male exiting the "
            "premises at a high rate of speed.")
plain = "I got there and spoke with Ms. Osei. She told me she saw a man run out of the store."

for label, text in (("original", original), ("plain", plain)):
    w, s, y, score = reading_ease(text)
    print(f"{label:8s} words {w:2d}  sentences {s}  syllables {y:2d}  "
          f"words/sentence {w / s:4.1f}  reading ease {score:5.1f}")

original words 32  sentences 1  syllables 53  words/sentence 32.0  reading ease  34.2
plain    words 20  sentences 3  syllables 21  words/sentence  6.7  reading ease 111.2

The plain version uses fewer words, much shorter sentences and shorter words. Its reading ease score is above 100, off the top of the usual scale, while the original scores in the mid-thirties, the range of difficult, bureaucratic prose. The facts are the same. The difference is entirely in how much effort the reader must spend to get them. Note that the 'Ms.' in the plain version counts as a sentence ending for this simple program, which slightly flatters the score; real readability tools handle abbreviations more carefully. The comparison still holds.

Accuracy

Plain writing is pointless if it is wrong. Accuracy means that every fact in a report is correct and can be traced to a source: the officer's own observation, a witness, a document or a record. It sounds obvious, but small errors are common and their consequences can be large. A wrong date of birth can attach a criminal record to the wrong person. A misspelled name can make a witness impossible to find. A time copied wrongly from the notes can make the officer's account inconsistent with the dispatch records, and a defence lawyer will put the two side by side in front of the jury.

Accuracy also means precision. 'A large amount of cash' tells the reader little; '1,240 in 20 and 50 dollar bills' tells the reader exactly what was found. 'A short distance' should be a distance, measured or estimated, and the report should say which. 'Several minutes' should be a time. When the officer does not know something precisely, the report should say so honestly: 'about 20 m, estimated by pacing', 'between 0300 and 0330 hrs, according to the owner, who could not be more precise'. Honest uncertainty is a form of accuracy.

Copying is a special danger. Officers who attend many similar calls, impaired driving stops for example, are tempted to reuse wording from earlier reports. Courts in both countries have criticized reports that described every suspect with identical phrases, and judges have rejected evidence when it became clear that an officer's report described observations he could not have made in that case. Every report must describe the events of that incident, as that officer perceived them.

Objectivity

An objective report records facts without letting the writer's feelings, assumptions or preferred outcome shape how they are presented. Perfect objectivity is impossible, because every report involves choices about what to include and how to say it. But officers can avoid the most common ways that subjectivity creeps in.

• Loaded words. Words like 'hysterical', 'belligerent', 'sketchy', 'claimed' and 'admitted' carry judgments. 'She was hysterical' is an opinion; 'She was crying loudly and shouting, and twice I asked her to slow down so I could understand her' is a description. 'He claimed he was home' suggests the officer disbelieved him; 'He said he was home' does not.
• Conclusions presented as facts. 'He was drunk', 'she was lying' and 'the suspect fled' all state conclusions. Record the observations that support them: the odour of alcohol, the inconsistency between two statements, the man running away when officers arrived. Where an opinion is part of the officer's job, such as an opinion about impairment, set out the observations it is based on.
• Selective reporting. Including only the facts that support a charge and leaving out those that do not is both unfair and dangerous. If a witness said the man she saw was taller than the suspect, or a second witness described a different jacket, those facts belong in the report. Prosecutors must disclose them, and an officer who left them out will be asked why.
• Irrelevant personal information. Details of a person's race, religion, sexual orientation, appearance or lifestyle belong in a report only when they are relevant, for example as part of a description used to identify someone. Gratuitous detail suggests bias and has been used to discredit officers.

Including facts that favour the accused is not disloyalty to the investigation. It is part of the officer's duty to the truth and to the court, and it protects the prosecution from later surprises. The disclosure rules from R. v. Stinchcombe require the Crown to disclose relevant information whether it helps or hurts its case, and the police have a corresponding duty to give the Crown everything relevant. A report that records everything relevant, fairly, makes the officer a credible witness. One that reads like an argument invites the defence to look for what was left out.

Grammar, spelling and the small things

Readers judge the writer from the writing. A report full of spelling mistakes and broken sentences suggests carelessness, and a defence lawyer may suggest the investigation was careless too. Spell-checkers catch some errors but miss words that are spelled correctly but wrong, such as 'there' for 'their', and they do not check names. Officers should verify the spelling of every name with the person or an identity document and use the same spelling throughout.

A few grammatical problems cause real confusion. Misplaced modifiers can change meaning: 'While handcuffing the suspect, the knife fell from his pocket' says the knife was doing the handcuffing. Pronouns with unclear references are another trap: 'Lindqvist told Osei that she had locked the door' does not say who locked it. Long sentences that string several events together with 'and then' can hide the sequence. The cure for most of these problems is the same: short sentences, one fact or action each, with the person doing the action named at the start.

Technology and the writer's responsibility

Reports are increasingly written with the help of technology. Records management systems offer templates and drop-down menus, and since 2024 some agencies have trialled software that uses artificial intelligence to draft a report narrative from body-worn camera audio. The appeal is obvious: report writing takes a large share of every shift. But the officer remains responsible for every word. A draft produced by software may mishear words, mix up speakers, include things the officer did not perceive or leave out things the officer did. At least one large prosecutor's office in Washington State told police in 2024 that it would not accept narratives drafted with artificial intelligence, and other agencies and legislatures have begun requiring officers to disclose when such tools are used and to certify that they reviewed the result. Whatever tools an agency adopts, the standard does not change: the report must be the officer's accurate, honest account.