“Okay, sir, this is to figure out what your aptitude’s good at and get you a jail job while you’re being a particular individual in jail.”

why? – there’s more than one way to describe the same situation. If each police when confronted with the same situation can describe the situation in the same manner, that would make them appear impartial like robots performing a task – enforcing the law and evidence would be better collaborated for example during a trial.

1) Cops write a lot of reports. Report-writing is a skill taught to police with technical accuracy as the goal, using words that cannot be easily construed to mean something else. “Arrested” and “apprehended” actually have two distinct and different meanings, so the words must be used appropriately.

2) Cops testify in court. They will get torn apart by a good defense lawyer if their language is not precise. “I smelled marijuana on his breath,” is a very weak statement. Marijuana? The smell the smoke makes, or the smell the plant makes before you burn it. How can you be sure it was coming from his breath? Could it have been clinging to his clothes? Maybe it was a passenger who exhaled just as you walked up? So the cop is trained to say “I smelled the odor of burning marijuana emanating from the vehicle.” How does he know the smell of burning marijuana? He’s been subjected to a ‘controlled burn’ and the time and date are in his training record, available by subpoena to the defense. That’s just an example. But yes, ‘fleeing’ and ‘running’ are two different words, and if you say a person was ‘running away’ and the defense attorney makes a big issue out of the fact that his client cannot actually ‘run’ due to a knee injury (or something), you lose – so you say he was ‘fleeing’, which simply means leaving and refusing to stop. He might have been limping fast, and it is still ‘fleeing’.

I don’t know why they would be ‘untraining’ police after having spent so much time training them to speak this way in court in the first place. Juries might be turned off by it, but defense lawyers will eat you up if you misspeak while giving sworn testimony. I mean, if you screw up while speaking in court (grin).

3) Once cops start speaking this way, it becomes very natural, a patois like any other. And cops understand each other, they mostly all talk the same way. Cops don’t have many friend. Mostly other cops and other first responders and hospital shift workers. So they all learn the lingo, and they all speak it to one degree or another.

It’s natural. Consider carnies, gypsies, and so on. Social subcultures which are outside of normal society, either by choice, ethnicity, work hours, or, as in the case of police, because they’re shunned by society unless needed.

In my opinion that was deliberate weaseling rather than unintentional ambiguity; that is, I think Henry meant to have Becket killed, but wanted deniability afterward…and I assume he had his hair-shirting “contrition” planned well in advance.

Also, if you “show” that “that wasn’t what you meant” by executing the murderers, you don’t have to pay them what you promised them, and they can’t rat you out later.

I doubt, actually, that Henry II invented this technique, but he certainly has been imitated ever since by commanders who are willing to betray both ethics and the people under them. Two words: Abu Ghraib.

I know Carlin had a bit about “Pre-boarding”. A ridiculous term.

A big one I hate is “pre-owned cars”. Sorry, it’s a used car. Every car, even a new car was previously owned. The car company owned it first.

Pre-Washed. When you buy salad at the supermarket, it says “pre-washed”. It is either washed or it is not. The “pre” adds nothing. It just needs to say washed.

Then there are acronyms which are self-referential, which are known as TIARAs (TIARA Is A Recursive Acroym).

It gets worse from there. :)

(It comes from evidence; if you say someone has a “gold watch”, and you hand them back a tin watch that’s been painted gold, they can say, “hey, where’s my gold watch?” and then Bad Things Happen. So “gold in color” is a CYA term, and makes sense. But it gets silly when applied to non-metallic colors. What else is it going to be, green in size?)

Then again, I work for the government. After a few years, the jargon just flows out whether you want it to or not.

Unfortuantely, many such systems have been changed over to digital trunked and switched systems, which are pretty hard to listen in on.

It is not, as has been suggested here, that all chosen career paths have their own unique lexicons. They do, assuredly, but to varying degrees. For instance, part of a doctor’s training is the correct use of terminology relating to medicine, but you won’t hear a baker saying, “I must procure the sweet breadlike food from the dry heat of the food preparation compartment” when saying “I need to get the cake out of the oven” is so much simpler.

A great deal of copspeak comes directly from legalese, though often with measurable errancy. It is, as has also been suggested here, that the offending cops wish to sound smarter than they are. It is not that police officers have been trained by their superiors to speak in this way, unlike lawyers, doctors, plumbers, electricians, computer programmers, ad infinitum. So, while many professionals are required to speak in a way that confounds the average person, most often it is to enhance specificity; not to diminish it. Can the same be said of cops who use terms like “alleged perpetrator”? The real lexicon of police is limited to grunts and insults, mostly.

I know a lot of police officers, and the one thing I can tell you is: most detectives don’t talk that way, unless they’re on TV. Federal investigators don’t talk that way, except on TV. No one talks that way, unless they wish to convey a heightened sense of importance and/or understanding of a given situation. It is predominantly beat cops who do talk that way, 24/7. But not all of them do. One must assume that the ones who do it the most are also the ones who’ve watched the most episodes of Cops.

However, I imagine that after a while, it gets to be like any workplace, with the keen young people trying to get promotions by talking the talk. I bet a lot of cops cringe when someone says “purport” around them in the same way I cringe when someone around me says “synergies”.

You use the term “jargon” to describe this phenomenon, and by doing so, you illustrate my point. Jargon is defined as: “the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group.”

The words we’re discussing aren’t peculiar to cops. Not by a long shot. It is not the vocabulary, but the usage, that defines the “patois,” although I hesitate to call it that for the very same reason. You’re right in suggesting that a history of giving testimony will contribute to anyone’s use and misuse of the language, but the majority of cops I hear speaking in that way are just out of the academy.

Veteran cops, on the other hand, usually go out of their way to combat such imprecision.

Most of the time, you’re not talking about something where those meanings would be appropriate, but I guess if you’re in that precision mindset…

Yep, same as the persistant use of the word “lady”, when “woman” is what they mean.

Subject was black and handcuffed but was talking back so I shot him in the back.

“I was standing at a stationary observation point, when…”

@67–Arkizzle,
I agree with your thought about “lady”. The military seems to have taken your idea to an extreme by referring to all women as “females”. It seems the term “woman” is unacceptable for some reason. I wonder if this is left over from a time when wom..sorry, females were less than welcome in the US military.

Anything you say…can’t be much.

I can only state that during the time I worked in law enforcement (military and civilian, 10 years total, 1980′s), ‘cop talk’ was common among officers. With respect, I believe most who know how cops talk are or were cops. It may very well be the case that some cops ‘police’ (pardon the pun) their language in front of civilians.

Others use the same lingo, as noted in this thread, and I sometimes cringe when I hear it used badly or inappropriately – or, like many slang terms, long after it has fallen out of use amongst ‘real’ police. The never-ending use of the term ‘perp walk’ on television always makes me laugh – I never heard a cop call it that. It used to be common to call tennis shoes ‘felony flyers’, but it has been awhile since I’ve heard them called that – police jargon comes and goes.

Reporters, court officials (not just the teevee kind) and others who rub up against cops will sometimes attempt to copy the mannerisms and language they hear from police. I won’t claim to know why, but it could be an attempt to be ‘one of the guys’.

Police tend to be cliquish, as I’m sure many know. Being ostracized from society, many also tend to ostracize themselves and stick to their own. Joseph Wambaugh’s books were very accurate depictions of the society of police, IMHO.

I don’t work in law enforcement anymore, by choice. It’s a hard life, and it trains people (IMHO) to treat those-who-are-not-cops as criminals or potential criminals. Everyone is a liar, everyone is a crook, everyone has an angle. Everyone is out to catch you wrong, so you cover each other’s backsides and develop an us-versus-them mentality after awhile.

I cannot prove, but I suspect, that a lot of the use of jargon is simply to make it easy to keep the wall up between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

It’s like a passphrase – you speak the lingo and I trust you and let my guard down. I don’t need to see a badge or ID, I know who you are and what your values are. You’re one of us, an equal. That’s how that kid was able to pretend to be a Chicago cop the other day – he got the words and moves down, he came off as one of them, and they bought it for a little while.