reports

Alan Rittenhouse: I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...

Over the years I have come to understand three things about the police: 1) They cover up virtually everything involving a police officer. 2) They will not enforce the laws for people that they do not like. 3) They will target people that they do not like for prosecution using various techniques that include unwarranted stops, drug testing, faked police reports, tickets, fines, blatantly mislead the judge at court, and removal of USA federal rights.

Corporate media rarely reports the fact that police internal affairs uphold hardly any complaints from the masses.

Police officers seem nice until they start targeting you for stops, give you a bogus speeding ticket and write fake police reports about their interactions with you

With homework, school prepares students for overtime. With reports, it prepares them for payday.

Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics.

It__ useful to make the distinction between reports and stories. A report is above all responsible for providing the facts, without manipulation or interpretation. Stories, on the other hand, are a way that people try to make sense of their lives and their experiences in the world. The test of a good story isn__ its responsibility to the facts as much as its ability to provide a satisfying explanation of events. In a few paragraphs, the reader learns of the problem (sales and profits are down), gets a plausible explanation (the company lost its direction), and learns a lesson (don__ stray, focus on the core). There__ a neat end with a clean resolution. No threads are left hanging. Readers go away satisfied.Now, there__ nothing wrong with stories, provided we understand that__ what we have before us. More insidious, however, are stories that are dressed up to look like science. They take the form of science and claim to have the authority of science, but they miss the real rigor and logic of science. They__e better described as pseudoscience. Richard Feynman had an even more memorable phrase: Cargo Cult Science. Here__ the way Feynman described it: In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they__e arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas _ he__ the controller _ and they wait for the airplanes to land. They__e doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn__ work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they__e missing something essential, because the planes don__ land.That__ not to say that Cargo Cult Science doesn__ have some benefits. The folks who wait patiently by the landing strips on their tropical island, dressed up like flight controllers and wearing a pair of coconut headsets, may derive some contentment from the whole process _ they may live in hope of a better future, they may enjoy having something to believe in, and they may feel closer to supernatural powers. But it__ just that _ it__ a story. It__ not a good predictor of what will happen next.The business world is full of Cargo Cult Science, books and articles that claim to be rigorous scientific research but operate mainly at the level of storytelling.

Journalism is not like fiction and will never be. In fiction, you can feed people with lies, yet at the end of the reading, people still live the same life - go to work, eat, come back home, and sleep - nothing really changes aside from, at the very least, their perception of the world. But, things are different in journalism. You tell people a barefaced life, they will believe it, and something is going to happen. People will promptly respond to what they believe is true because it relates to their life, and we take life seriously, don't we?

It has been my experience that law enforcement reports are littered with fabrications, inaccuracies, omissions, fraud, fantasies and willful blindness.