The Use-of-Force Report,
and What It Must Contain

A complete use-of-force report answers a supervisor’s questions without a follow-up conversation. Generally accepted practice, as reflected in national model policies and in agency reporting rules, treats the following as the working content of that document.

One threshold question comes before the content. Agencies generally define in writing which force has to be reported at all, and where that line sits, or whether one was ever written, decides whether a document exists to be read. Counsel meeting a file with no force report should establish the agency’s own reporting threshold before treating the absence as anything else.

Before the force was used.

• What the officer knew on arrival: the dispatched call, the information broadcast, and what was observed on approach
• The subject’s actions as they presented, including the resistance or the threat the officer perceived
• Warnings and commands given, the opportunity to comply, and any reason a warning was not feasible
• Alternatives attempted or considered before the option used, where policy and training placed them on the table

The force, and everything after it.

• The specific force used, by which officer, how many times, and applied to what
• Injuries observed on any person present, and the aid requested or rendered, with times
• Witnesses identified by name and contact information, civilian and officer alike
• Evidence secured, photographed or booked, including the scene itself and any weapon
• The supervisor notified, when the notification was made, and what the supervisor did on scene
• Times throughout: the call, the arrival, the force, the aid, the notification and the writing

Two of those requirements do most of the work in litigation. The first is attribution: force is documented officer by officer rather than as a squad, so a narrative reporting that officers deployed force without saying which officer did what has already fallen short of the standard. The second is enumeration: each separate application is reported with the reason for it at the point it occurred, so an account that compresses several applications into one clause cannot be tested against the footage.

Nothing on either list calls for a legal judgment. Every item is an observable fact the writing officer had access to, which is exactly why the elements can be checked against the rest of the record item by item, years later, by someone who was not there.

Whether an involved officer may watch body-worn camera footage before writing is a policy choice, and agencies land in different places on it. The rule itself, and the access records that show whether a viewing occurred, are treated in body-worn camera policy and footage review. What belongs on the reporting side is narrower, and it begins with no assumption about which rule this agency chose: what the document itself has to disclose about its own making.

Where the agency’s policy requires a report written after a viewing to disclose it, the report is read for that disclosure. Where the agency required an account from memory first, an addendum written after review is a separate document with its own time, and the analysis reads the report for that disclosure and the file for the paperwork that matches it. Where the report is silent and nothing else in the file marks a viewing, the silence is documented against whatever the agency required its officers to record.

The reverse is equally a finding. Where policy permitted review and the report acknowledges it plainly, an account that tracks the footage is what the agency asked for, and the analysis says so in those terms. The sequence, in either direction, establishes when an account was formed. It does not establish intent.

A reporting question is only as good as the documents underneath it. Ask for the force paperwork as a family rather than as a single item, and ask for the rule it was written under at the same time.

• The use-of-force reporting policy in force on the date of the incident, with any general order or bulletin that modified it
• The completed force form or records-module printout for every involved officer, with all required fields as submitted
• The incident or arrest report and every supplement, each with its author and the date and time it was filed
• The supervisory review: the notification, the review itself, the signature, and any comment recorded with it
• The agency’s report-writing and video-review policies, which are frequently separate documents from the force policy
• The training the involved officers received on force reporting, which is where the standard reached them

Two of those are routinely missing from a first production. The submitted form is often replaced by a narrative summary that drops the required fields, and the supervisory review frequently lives in a different system from the report it approved. Those are precisely the documents that show whether the agency’s own process ran.

Assembled that way, the reporting record answers a narrow and checkable set of questions from paper the agency generated for its own internal use. The opinion built on it stays inside the same boundary: what the standard required, what the documents contain, and where the two separate.