Every police report is a story, and it has an author
What goes into a police report, what stays out and who makes that call. The part of police work no crime series shows, told by the officer who signs the paper.
LA VIDA DEL ESCRITOR
A police report is not a recording of what happened. It is what somebody decided to write about what happened, on a form, at the end of a shift, without yet knowing what the case will turn out to be about a year from now. Spanish criminal procedure law sums it up in a phrase nobody argues with and almost nobody examines: with the greatest exactitude.
«With the greatest exactitude» does not mean «everything»
Article 292 of the Spanish Criminal Procedure Act states that judicial police officers shall draw up a report of the steps they take, specifying with the greatest exactitude the facts they have ascertained, inserting the statements and reports received and noting all the circumstances they have observed that might be evidence or an indication of the offence.
Read the end again: circumstances that might be evidence. There is a conditional there, and behind the conditional there is a person deciding. Exactitude is not exhaustiveness. Nobody records every circumstance in the world; you record the ones the writer believes could end up meaning something. That judgement is made before anyone knows what will end up meaning something, which is precisely the worst moment to make it.
So the first thing worth understanding about a police report is that it is a selection. And every selection has a criterion, and every criterion has an owner.
There is a case file that appears in no police station. I wrote it for readers who want to see how an investigation that has not happened yet gets documented from the inside: what goes on the record, what is left out, and who decides the second. It is sent by email, and only to those who ask for it.
A police report is not evidence: it is a complaint
This is the part fiction always skips. Article 297 of the same act provides that reports drawn up by judicial police officers shall be considered complaints for legal purposes, and that any other statements they give shall have the value of witness testimony insofar as they refer to facts within their own knowledge.
Translated: the paper proves nothing by itself. It opens. It sets things in motion. Whatever inside it may one day count as evidence will have to be said again somewhere else, in front of other people, with a defence lawyer asking why this was written down and not that.
Writing with that in mind changes your hand. You are not writing to be believed; you are writing so that in two years someone who was not there can reconstruct what you saw, in what order and in what light. It is an exercise in technical honesty far more uncomfortable than it sounds, because it forces you to put the limits of your own knowledge in writing.
What gets left out is almost never left out on purpose
When something is missing from a report, the boring explanation is almost always the right one. It is missing because nobody saw it. Because whoever saw it did not read it as relevant. Because it did not fit any box on the form and including it meant inventing a section. Because the person who told you refused to sign. Because at that hour of the night the human brain is a mediocre measuring instrument.
The form itself is not neutral either. A form is a theory about what kinds of facts exist: it asks for time, place, identity, objects, injuries. What the form does not ask tends not to get written. And what does not get written, for the purposes of the proceedings, did not happen.
That sentence is harsh and true at the same time, and it is why the word «report» works for me as a metaphor for almost everything. Any archive, any register, any database is a version of reality cut to the shape of whoever designed the mould.
Fiction has the opposite problem
On screen, the camera has seen everything. The viewer knows the facts and the paperwork is a formality dispatched in a three-second shot: somebody types, somebody signs, cut. The documentation shows up as friction, the bureaucratic toll between one action scene and the next.
Real work runs the other way. For months, the case is the paper. There is no case beyond what is on record. Nobody is going to rewind the night. All that survives is what a tired officer managed to fit into a form, and the decisions taken while fitting it govern everything that follows.
There is an enormous narrative engine there that almost nobody uses: the gap between what happened and what is on record. You do not need a villain for those two things to diverge. A long shift and a badly designed form will do.
That is why I write the future as a case file
When I sit down to write science fiction, I do not invent a world and then look for a way to tell it. I go the other way round: I ask what paperwork that world would generate, who would sign it and what would be left out of it. You understand a system better through its records than through its speeches.
That is where the tone of The Loop comes from: a techno-thriller that reads like something somebody had to document, with the discomfort of knowing that whoever documents also chooses.
It is not an aesthetic decision. It is the only way I know of writing the future without lying: by showing the paperwork.
Next time you read a headline that begins «according to the police report», remember that somebody wrote it. Somebody with a name, a number and a shift. And that before writing the first line, that somebody had to decide what not to tell.
Next read
Two posts that continue this one: The day the perpetrator is not a person and What I hate about modern science fiction.
The novel to read next: The Loop, a cyberpunk thriller about temporal anomalies: a world trapped in a 24-hour cycle that everyone is aware of.