Brignardello 1
Stephanie Brignardello
Professor Dees
English 102
24 April 2015
Behind the Flashing Lights and Loud Sirens
Final Paper – Task 4
With everything happening recently in the world involving police corruption,
everyone seems to have a negative outlook on the police force. With cases such as Ferguson
and Martin, the cops aren’t doing that great appearance wise. Why is this happening
though? Everyone seems to think that weapons are the only things used by cops to stop
crime and make the community safer. This is completely untrue though. Louis Brignardello,
former cop from the Las Vegas Police Department, stated that the number one rule police
officers follow is: only use a weapon if it is absolutely needed and someone’s life is about to
be taken away or risked. Weapons are only the beginning of what police officers use to
make the community a safer place. What most people don’t know is that language is the
most important “weapon” used in the police force. Crazy, right? Who would have ever
expected? My question though is how do they use language to function, survive, and
succeed if weapons aren’t used much? And how does learning about this help us developing
academic writers?
Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, is a place where everyone goes to gamble, drink, and
have fun. I lived there for seven years due to my dad’s job as a detective for the Las Vegas
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Police Department. He plays a huge part in my life and his job influenced my decision in
choosing my discourse community to further investigate: The Las Vegas Police Department.
The American police department has existed for over 200 years and has been able to
function properly thanks to a variety of genres. Now if you’re unclear on what exactly a
genre is, don’t worry, I was a little confused too until Charles Bazerman explained it: genres
are types of texts that are recognizable to the readers and writers, and that meet the needs
of the rhetorical situation to which they function. How can the police force, whose main
priority is stopping and preventing crime, revolve around “texts”? Because it is a discourse
community, and as James Porter would define it, it is a local and temporary constraining
system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a
common focus. According to the work of linguist John Swales, a discourse community is a
group of people that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals.
According to Swales, a community is a discourse community if it follows six criteria:

it has a broadly agrees set of common public goals,

has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members,

uses it participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback

uses genres to further its aims

has specific lexis

has experienced members with a degree of expertise.
The police force certainly follows all of these criteria.
Sadly, research done on the police force usually involves problems with hate crimes,
but these issues shouldn’t define this community. Not enough research has been done on
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the genre set used by cops in the past so I felt as if I should be the one who changes the
public opinion for the better. A genre set, as defined by Charles Bazerman, is a group of
several genres that predictably recur inside a domain-specified community (Honig 91).
I will be explaining my discourse community as an activity system, which also has
purposes, tools, rules, a subject, community, and division of labor. By looking at my
discourse community as an activity system, I will construct an activity triangle using
activity theory, with tools at the top, subject on the middle left, object on the middle right,
rules in the lower left, the community in the lower middle, and division in the lower right,
such that it looks like this:
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So why did I throw a bunch of definitions and a triangle at you? Because all of these
components will help you as an audience understand my topic better: the different genres
used and the importance of language in the police department. I will also try to find out
whether or not the genres used in one police department are the same in others.
The first thing I did to conduct my research was interview two former police officers
who I knew could help me solve my mission of finding different genres used by the
department. I was pretty lucky to have them so easily accessible. The first interview I had
was with my father, who I basically ran to when I knew that I wanted to write about this.
He was asked about how cops communicated between each other while on duty, what the
different genres they use how effective they are, and personal stories involving these
genres and ways of communication. He told me about the most important genre “The Police
Handbook – Las Vegas “ and since I live three hours away, he sent it up to me to better
prepare me for my research. The second person I interviewed was Devin Williams, LVPD’s
Office of Public Information’s head/former cop, and friends with Lou. He was asked many
questions about the different ways cops communicate with each other, about the genre
system used and how effective it is. He also told me about the handbook but warned me
that I would find a little bit of difficulty with it because of the specific lexis used in it. Lou
and Devin were able to tell me about a couple of the main phrases and terms I would find in
the handbook, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough when reading it. After talking to them,
reading most of “The Police Handbook”, which by the way is a really long book, taking a
look at a couple precedents which are real life cases in which cops had to pull out their
police handbook to help them, and gathering more sources to better help my research and
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understanding of the community, I filled in my activity triangle to support my findings and
show the audience exactly what my discourse community consists of in regards to Swale’s
criteria.
I accomplished the three important goals of activity theory in my triangle, as stated by
Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle in “Activity Theory: An Introduction for the Writing
Classroom:”

it accounts for aspects of a system to better understand the nature of activity
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
it analyzes how the parts of a system work together to better anticipate participants’ needs
and goals

it isolates problems to develop solutions
Through the analysis, I found that every police department, not just LVPD, all use most of
the same genres to accomplish their goal. I mean, it’s understandable, right? Police officers all
have one duty: to protect and serve. In the activity system, the genres I mentioned were
crime.about.com, lawofficer.com, the Police handbook, precedents, and the Police Rule Book,
also known as the Police Patrol Combat Rules Book. Crime.about.com is one of the two most
used websites by cops. It provides them with the latest headlines and criminal case news that
don’t occur everyday. Why is this an important genre? Every single case that a police officer
deals with is different. A type of intertextuality is applied here, but in real life: by looking at
other cases, police officers can take examples from them and know what to do in a similar
situation. The second most used website is lawofficer.com. It includes the tactics, technology,
training, and laws used within the department. There is also an “online store” section on this
website selling exclusive products such as cop car accessories, weapons, accessories, and range
equipment, and even study aids to prepare police officers who would like to be promoted to
sergeant. These two websites are very important in being up to date with everything. They are
both not used while on duty, but are used whenever they have free time or are working on really
long cases that involve researching while off duty. Next, we have the Police Patrol Combat Rules
Book. This genre is mostly used during training, with the occasional “look up” while a
professional. It includes the responsibilities, disciplines, regulations, and operations that a police
officer must follow. Finally, we have the Police Handbook I have been waiting to talk about.
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This is an indispensable resource for not only law enforcement students who are being prepared
for the real police world, but also professionals who have been working as police officers their
entire lives. The handbook is huge but is easily
understandable only for cops and helpful in getting the information they need at that instant.
Whenever in doubt, they use the handbook. This handbook also contains everything they need to
know: the powers of police, types of patrol (foot, bicycle, motorcycle, cruiser), the types of
equipment and technology and how to use them, community expectations, the types of arrests
that can be made according to the laws, etc. After reading the handbook, I wondered if the terms
used in the book were different in comparison to the terms used in another department’s
handbook. I decided to research and find out. Law enforcement jargon refers to a large body of
acronyms, abbreviations, codes and slang used by law enforcement personnel to provide quick
concise descriptions of people, places, property and situations. After finishing my research, I was
correct with my hypothesis: every handbook has different terms and phrases. Although most of
them are similar in regards to describing people, the street names and locations are different. For
example, if a police officer says there’s an ADW at i23 in Las Vegas, this would mean that
there’s an assault with a deadly weapon at the intersection of Bermuda and Hiatus, I being
intersection, and 23 Bermuda and Hiatus. Descriptions such as A- Asian, B-Black, H-Hispanic,
W-White, AA-Adult, J-Juvenile, M-Male and F-Female, are the same in all books.
What about warnings, citations, police reports, accident reports, criminal complaints, or
requests for search warrants? These are the so-called precedents, another genre used by cops and
were included under tools in my activity system. These are really important genres in their jobs
because without them, it’d be difficult to know how to handle situations. You know the phrase
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“monkey see, monkey do”? Yeah, that’s actually true. Becoming a police officer isn’t easy. You
must either earn a bachelor’s degree or join the military in order to achieve your goal. Once a
cop, you can then work your way up and become sergeant, lieutenant, chief, or detective. As
Swales describes, there are different levels of expertise in the discourse community (Swales
473). Because of the different levels, newly joined policemen, of course, learn from the more
experienced ones. They don’t know the codes, phrases or gestures right off the bat. The newbies
takke example from their coworkers and they’ll use it on a daily basis. No one is born a crime
stopper. This is again intercommunication, which in writing occurs when texts get their meaning
from other texts, which is basically always (Greene 34).
All of these genres make up the activity system used today in almost all police
department. In the words of Amy Devitt, “all genres exist through and depend on human action”
(Bawarshi, Devitt and Reiff 548). So why is language used so much in a job where solving
crimes is the main priority? Well, if you think about it, it protects not only the officer, but also
the criminal: if any position should come afterward that protests the action or judgment of the
officer, or criminal, then it will be documented or said in court. A well written and detailed
report is key to an officer’s job: it details what was said by witnesses, what the officer witnessed,
where things were located, what a suspect was wearing, etc. Without the reports, it would be
difficult to prosecute and create many loop holes for the defense as it helps the officer to
remember accounts that might have happened months ago. There’s a saying that’s gone around
for centuries: if it’s not on paper, it never happened.
Another question I asked myself is how do cops interact between each other? What are
the mediums used in order to convey messages? Crime.about.com, the website that was
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mentioned before, is one of them. By police officers writing articles about the cases that they
handle, other cops are able to view them and learn from them. Today the most commonly used
law enforcement communications device is the two-way radio. Personal data assistants (PDAs)
are also a relatively new law enforcement communications device. They help officers in a variety
of ways, including doing language translations for non-English speaking people they come in
contact with. They also help law enforcement to verify information, keep track of court
appearances and file reports. Law enforcement communications technology has evolved in ways
that enable them to use language more often instead of weapons to get their job done more
effectively.
The genres I talked about in my last couple of paragraph are able to further the goals of
police officers not only in the Las Vegas Police Department, but in every department. For
anyone reading this paper, I surely hope that the descriptions and explanations of the genres
police officers use, changes your opinion on the use of weapons. No one really knows how much
language is used in their community and they deserve to be praised for being so proficient in the
English language and community. LVPD definitely follows all six criteria of Swales’ discourse
community, unlike many other discourse communities. I’m not going to say that I am now a
genius and know everything there is to know about the police department but I’m content with
all of the research I conducted.
In her research, Devitt acknowledges that “knowing the genre means knowing such
things as appropriate subject matter, level of detail, tone, and approach as well as the usual
layout and organization” (Devitt 577). Victoria Marro in “The Genres of Chi Omega” says this
explains the need for observation when becoming enculturated into a community, to learn things
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such as tone, level of detail, approach and subject matter. This is something I would like to
investigate further. As I mentioned earlier in my paper, they must go to school for a very long
time but I’m wondering what kinds of steps they take in order to become so proficient not only in
“crime stopping” but in the English language at the same time. My favorite quote that
Shakespeare once said can conclude my findings perfectly: "Language is a powerful weapon and
in the hands of a skilled person it can be used to manipulate others" for the better though.
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Works Cited
"Law Enforcement Article - How Does Law Enforcement Communicate with Each Other?"
Law Enforcement RSS. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
"Law, Litigation and Legal, Common Law and Testimony." Law, Litigation and Legal,
Common Law and Testimony. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
"NRA Police Pistol Combat Rule Book." Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
Marro Victoria. “The Gernes of Chi Omega: An Activity Analysis.” Stylus: A Journal of FirstYear Writing 3.1 (2012): 25-32 words. Web, 11 Sept. 2013.
Wardle, Elizabeth. “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Work-places.”
Enculturation 5.2 (2004): n. pag. Web. 18 Feb. 2010
Swales, John. “The concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.
Bazerman, Charles. “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize
Activity and People.” What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to
Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. London:
Routledge, 2004. 309-39. Print
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Porter, James E. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Rhetoric Review 5.1
(1986): 34-47. Print
Brignardello, Louis. Personal Interview. 20 Feb. 2015.
Williams, Devi. Personal Interview. 20 Feb 2015.
Las Vegas Police Department. The Las Vegas Police Department Handbook. Las Vegas:
Random, 1988. Print
Wardle, Elizabeth A., and Doug Downs. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Second
Edition ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. Print.