WAIT! So FDP Officer Wilson, whos ILLEGALLY refusing to make a report for fear of being incriminated

[Travelman]

131. Does anyone have a link to this "illegal refusal to make a report?"

I would be very interested in seeing such a link indeed. A credible one, please.


Personally, I don't want police writing reports about some sort of incident that involves them directly. I want a third party investigating that and writing the reports. Think about it:

Cop shoots X person. Doesn't really matter who. Maybe he had to. Maybe the guy was shooting at him first, or attacking him with an axe or whatever. But maybe it's not a case where he had to defend himself. Do you really want the guy who shot someone else to just decide what's going to be in a police report and then close the case? I sure as hell don't.

And it doesn't have to be shootings, either. Maybe it's a traffic accident. Cop screws up and rear-ends you. If he's the guy writing the report, he can just write it up that you backed into him, and then it's "official" and you're completely boned.

You could apply that to all sorts of situations, and in no case is it really a great idea to not have a dis-interested third party doing the investigation.


When this shooting first happened, at least according to the Ferguson police chief, he immediately called St. Louis County PD and asked them to take over the investigation. There seems to be a significant amount of documentation that has been released to back that up: dispatch transcripts, statements from other officers, the fact that County PD arrived on the scene in one of the videos taken immediately after the shooting, the coroner's report, etc., etc., etc. That makes perfectly good sense to me: have someone else who is not directly involved take the reports, the witness statements, do the forensics, collect the evidence, etc. And that includes taking Wilson's statement, as well as any follow-up stuff with Wilson.

So I personally would not expect any report actually written by or filed by Wilson whatsoever, other than perhaps a short "I encountered XYZ at ABC time and a shooting occurred; investigation immediately turned over to County PD for investigation." Other than that, I'm pretty sure I don't want the Ferguson PD involved in this investigation at all.