Stats for Part I offenses are based on incidents reported to the police, not arrests made by the police. These offenses include homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, rape, theft, etc. This is how cities typically measure their crime rate and how high crime areas are identified.
Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes, prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats are driven by police enforcement.
The nearly blank narrative is listed under the header “public narrative”. Many departments use this to separate out the actual narrative from what can be immediately provided to the public (often just a sentence or two). So, there’s a possibility the full narrative was withheld as it’s an active investigation.
It’s also not uncommon practice for initial report narratives to be somewhat anemic when the follow-up investigation is immediate. Homicides being a perfect example where, in many agencies, all the useful details beyond “found dead guy” are in the murder book (i.e. case notes) outside of RMS.
The narrative is mostly blank because the media probably couldn’t get the full narrative as it’s an ongoing investigation and thus not subject to open records. It looks like they only got the public narrative [1] which simply states “PIU Investigation” and are pretending to be shocked. In any case, you would expect most details to be contained in supplements or the case file, not the initial incident report narrative.
The forced entry checkbox and injuries only have meaning in the context of an offense and “Death Investigation” isn’t a reportable offense or incident, it’s just a placeholder. When they have a finding (justifiable or criminal homicide) then they’ll either complete a supplement or generate a new incident which will need to have certain flags and drop-down options set correctly for reporting.
That any of this is being used as some sort of evidence of a cover-up is ridiculous.
> The narrative is mostly blank because the media probably couldn’t get the full narrative as it’s an ongoing investigation and thus not subject to open records.
It's not "the narrative", it's the incident report.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you are correct that they aren't obligated to release the incident report. But they did release the incident report, presumably as a pretense of transparency and/or good will. The fact that it is basically blank shows that the pretense is just that, a pretense.
> In any case, you would expect most details to be contained in supplements or the case file, not the initial incident report narrative.
I would expect the incident report to report the incident. This isn't confusing.
Your argument here is basically, "Oh don't worry, that's just the report with the lies--the report with the truth exists somewhere, you'll get to see it eventually!" But that's no less damning: why is there a report with lies on it, and why is the report with the lies on it the only one the public gets to see?
If you're arguing that not reporting the incident in the incident report, or not having transparency, are police norms, I won't disagree with you there, but that's a huge problem.
> But they did release the incident report, presumably as a pretense of transparency and/or good will.
No argument here; either release useful information or don’t.
> Your argument here is basically, "Oh don't worry, that's just the report with the lies--the report with the truth exists somewhere, you'll get to see it eventually!"
Forced Entry doesn’t mean what people think it means and is probably correct on the report. As for selecting ‘None’ for injuries on the victim of a homicide, it sounds like the program that prints the report did that on its own (obviously needs to be fixed as computers shouldn’t be adding words to official reports). I don’t think it’s fair to call these things “lies” or use them as the basis for conspiracy theories as others here have.
> If you're arguing that not reporting the incident in the incident report, or not having transparency, are police norms, I won't disagree with you there, but that's a huge problem.
I would argue that restricting public access to complete police reports related to active investigations is both a norm and serves a legitimate state interest (protects the integrity of investigations). I would also argue that once the case is indicted/closed, it should be made available to the public for inspection.
Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes, prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats are driven by police enforcement.