Police Procedures Expert Witness:
as Written and as Carried Out

Whatever a police case is pleaded as, a question of police practices and procedures sits inside it, at the point where an officer's conduct meets what the agency directed. The directive at issue changes with the kind of claim.

In a use-of-force case, the question reaches past the force policy to the reporting directive: what the officer had to put in writing about the force, and how soon. The account the officer filed is tested against that directive and against use-of-force reporting standards. In an arrest case, it is the procedure the agency set for arrests made without a warrant, and what that procedure required of the arresting officer, on the street and on paper.

In a pursuit case, it is the vehicle pursuit directive or the agency's foot pursuit policy, and the conditions each set for starting a chase and ending one. In a claim about the investigation, it is the evidence and scene procedure: what had to be collected, logged and secured, and by whom. What the physical evidence itself shows is deferred to qualified experts in the relevant disciplines; whether the procedure was carried out is a practices question.

In a supervision claim that follows a use of force, it is the agency's directive on supervisor use-of-force reviews, read for the threshold at which a first-line supervisor had to respond and for when the written review was due. In each of these cases the first task of a police procedures expert witness is the same: to identify the directive that governed the conduct in question. In a sheriff's office the directives are typically the sheriff's general orders or policy manual, and how they are read against a deputy's conduct is set out under sheriff's office cases.

An incident moves through a sequence of steps, and the analysis reads all of them, not only the moment the complaint is about. Each step answers to a directive of its own where the agency wrote one: the call and the response to it, the contact, any force, custody and transport, the reports written afterward, and the supervisory review that follows them. The report a police procedures expert witness writes keeps to that sequence, the order in which the incident ran rather than the order of chapters in the manual.

Nothing in the sequence replaces reading a police policy manual, which is how each directive is found and read once the agency produces it. What the sequence adds is the incident's own clock: which directive governed as the officers reached each step, and which duties an earlier step brought into play, such as the reporting and review a use of force can trigger.

Each step is then written up in one fixed form. It states the requirement, in the operative words of the directive, cited to the document produced. It states the conduct, from what the video, the dispatch entries and the written reports show at that step. It closes with the comparison, which either records a match or names the point where conduct and requirement part.

The fixed form is what makes the sequence usable. A step that matched its directive gets the same three entries as one that departed from it, and the form is identical in plaintiff and defense retentions. Each step is judged on what the officers knew when they reached it, not on how the incident ended, and compliance does not carry from one step to the next: force that met the force directive can still be followed by a report that fell short of the reporting directive.

Every step also answers to generally accepted police practices, and any departure is entered on the practices ledger. By itself it establishes neither a constitutional violation nor liability, and the report keeps the constitutional question on a separate ledger. Legal conclusions remain counsel's; the expert addresses police practices. The directive in force that day, and the officer's acknowledgment of it, are also topics of an officer's deposition, set out under deposing police officers.

The same sequence shows where the written procedure stopped. At some step the officers may have met a situation no directive addressed, or a directive may have covered the subject without reaching the circumstance in front of them.

That step keeps its place in the sequence and its form. In place of the requirement, the report records that no directive addressed it, and the conduct is measured against generally accepted police practices, with the source of that standard named for the step. The absence is itself a practices finding, and it concerns what the agency wrote rather than what the officer did.

Conduct that met accepted practice at an unwritten step is recorded as a match, as it would be at any step with a directive. Whether the agency's training or its practice filled the space the manual left is read across policy, practice and training rather than assumed from the silence.

The report stops at the practices finding and leaves its legal weight in any claim against the agency to counsel. The organizational analysis such a claim draws on belongs with failure to train and Monell.

“The judge mentioned the credibility of his report in hearings. Highly effective in securing a dismissal with prejudice for our client.”