Writing an account of a use of force, and the four habits that cost most

Write it in FORCE, which puts the account in the order the decision is judged in and then reads it back, marking the four habits in place and naming the elements that are absent from the whole document. It rewrites nothing, deliberately. Nothing is uploaded.

The test is not the problem

Use of force is judged on what the person knew and believed at the time, and on whether what they did was necessary and proportionate to that. The standard is not controversial and it is not the thing accounts fail on.

Accounts fail on the writing. And the writing fails in four specific ways that all feel like careful report writing while you are doing them, which is exactly why they survive to the final draft.

One: a conclusion where a description belongs

“He became aggressive.”

That is a verdict, not an observation. It cannot be corroborated by footage, because no camera records aggression; it records a person doing things. It cannot be tested by anybody who was not there. And under questioning it collapses into the only question that was ever going to be asked: what did he actually do?

Which means the writer ends up giving the description anyway, from memory, months later, under pressure, instead of having written it down while it was fresh. The account was weaker for the conclusion and the conclusion did not survive.

“He clenched both fists, squared his shoulders and took two steps towards me” is the same sentence with evidence in it. The reader reaches “aggressive” on their own, which is worth far more than being told it, and the footage now corroborates the account rather than contradicting its adjective.

The same applies to threatening, hostile, non-compliant, agitated, erratic and combative. Every one is a conclusion wearing the clothes of an observation.

Two: the passive voice, which removes the person

“The baton was deployed.” “He was taken to the ground.” “Strikes were delivered.”

These describe events with nobody in them. Somebody deployed, somebody took him down, somebody struck, and the sentence has carefully not said who.

Writers do this for an understandable reason: it feels formal, and it feels less like a boast. The effect on a reader is the opposite of what is intended. A reviewer reading an account full of agentless events has to work out who did what, and an account that makes a reviewer guess invites the wrong guess. Worse, it reads as evasion even when it is habit, because the one thing the passive voice reliably does is conceal an actor.

“I struck him once to the left thigh with my baton” is a complete, owned, checkable sentence. It is also easier to defend than a sentence in which nobody appears to have done anything.

Three: hindsight in the paragraph where it does damage

“It later turned out that he was unarmed.”

That sentence is true and belongs in the account. It does not belong in the paragraph explaining what you believed at the time, because reasonableness is assessed on what was known then. Putting it there contaminates the decision with information that arrived afterwards, and it works against the writer, not for them, because it invites the reader to judge the decision with knowledge the decision-maker did not have.

The same information, placed in the paragraph about what happened next, is simply a fact. Nothing is hidden and nothing is spun. It is purely a question of which paragraph it sits in.

This is why a tool that flags hindsight everywhere is useless: in the account of the aftermath, “it turned out” is exactly the right phrase. It is only a problem in the paragraphs about knowledge and belief.

Four: the trade dialect

Escorted to the ground. Compliance technique. Pain compliance. Assisted to the floor. Non-compliant. The male. Conveyed. At this moment in time. Proceeded to.

Every one of these is heard by people outside the job as a euphemism, and some of them are heard as deliberate obfuscation. Read aloud in a hearing, “escorted to the ground” sounds like a phrase chosen to avoid saying what happened, even when the writer has used it every working day for fifteen years and means nothing by it at all.

The test is simple: would you use this phrase describing the incident to a friend? If you would say “I took him down” to a friend and “he was escorted to the ground” in a statement, the statement is in a dialect, and the dialect is doing you harm.

The five things reviewers find missing

Absence is invisible to the person who wrote the document, because they know what they meant. These five are the ones that turn up missing again and again:

1. What was said. Any warning, command or attempt to talk first, in the actual words. If there was no time to say anything, say that instead; it is an important fact, not a gap.
2. Why nothing less would do. The necessity. This usually belongs with the options you considered and rejected, and an option rejected for a stated reason is a decision, where an option not mentioned looks like one that never occurred to you.
3. Why it was no more than needed. Proportionality is a separate point from necessity and is the one most often missing entirely. It is often best shown by what you did not do, and by when you stopped.
4. What effect the force had. Including if it did not work. Force repeated because it failed is a different account from force that worked first time, and the difference has to be visible. Saying a technique failed is not an admission; omitting it is what creates the problem.
5. The aftercare. When restraint came off, whether a medic attended, what was said afterwards, who was informed. It is half the lawfulness and it is written last, at the end of a shift, in a hurry.

And one more, which sounds trivial and is not: a single clock time. One time in the document changes it from a story into a record. Times against the force and against the aftercare at minimum.

What none of this is

It is not about the force. An account written well does not make unreasonable force reasonable, and it is not supposed to. What it does is stop reasonable force being read as unreasonable, which is a real and common outcome and is entirely a function of how it was written down.

It is also not about writing well in a literary sense. Short sentences, plain words, active voice, in the order the decision is judged in. The best accounts read as though somebody is telling you what happened, because that is what they are.