Cop Talk 101: A beginner's guide to police bureaucratese
US police have their own flag. It represents the thin blue line—all that stands between civilians and death, a barricade if you will. Like most countries, they have their own language, too. Writing in the New Republic, journalist Patrick Blanchfield digs into the history of cop talk and the essential function it serves in preserving the institution:
After each new episode of horror, an efflorescence of coptalk prevents us from imagining any alternative way of defining and enforcing the civil peace. And the starkness of this brand of civilian-grade coptalk demands we think in its own terms alone. What we need is better training, some new slogans, the appeals run. What we will get instead are more pious promises, more technical lingo, more evasive bureaucratese—more coptalk to drape over and explain away the same old blunt encounters between the powerful and the vulnerable, between bullets and flesh. As the police pile gratuitous and labored detail onto stories engineered to justify their existence and absolve them of wrongdoing, everyone else fails to ask whether they are indeed the bedrock of society that at every turn they claim to be. Because talking about cops, even critically, raises the ever-present hazard of simply producing yet more coptalk—new impersonal jargon about threat and necessity and the absence of alternatives on which the survival of the institution depends.
If you decide to visit a hastily assembled press conference, or delve into Cop nation’s literature—the tabloids and local news that often just copy and paste press releases—here’s a handy dictionary of Coptalk:
Altercation: Physical force.
Barricaded: A skinny teenager locked the door.
Breached the barricade: The janitor unlocked the door (h/t Laurie Charles)
Blockade: A mentally ill homeless man may or may not have locked the door before proceeding to stab a woman 40 times while officers waited an hour and a half for backup.
Discharged weapon: An officer discharged his weapon, seriously wounding or killing a civilian.
Excited delirium: A nonexistent condition that serves to explain suspicious deaths that only happen in police custody.
Officer-involved shooting: An officer shot a civilian.
Suspect: Any person who may have been arrested or shot.
Sources say: Police say.
Officials say: Police say.