Pen and pad - The city should get digital [OT]

[Sidney Shapiro]

I was recently witness to an incident and I called 911 to report an
emergency. After the police arrived, and I repeated what had happened to
several police officers, the sergeant in charge, and some by standers,
the sergeant asked me to give a statement. This entailed dictating my
statement word for word to a police officer who wrote out a dozen or so
pages in his notebook in capital letters over the course of a couple
hours. He then proceeded to write out his questions and my answers and
after letting me read over everything he had written, I signed the
statement in his notebook. This was an incident which took place in
about thirty seconds, recounting it took over three hours. All the while
I stood there wishing the city would just get some electronic way of
doing this, and making everyone's life so much easier. The lesson I took
away from this is twofold. First, always have a camera next to the
phone; a picture is worth a thousand words. Secondly, try to get as much
detail as possible and then condense it into a couple of sentences if it
is going to be dictated in the old fashion manner.
 
Sid
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