I’VE MENTIONED THIS BEFORE, but here’s more on cut-and-paste in police reports:

“It’s a shortcut and I shouldn’t have done it,” Officer Daniel Pratt said in his recent testimony, before apologizing on the stand.

When asked by defense attorney Mary Carey why police officers aren’t supposed to cut and paste, he responded: “For the obvious reasons of mistakes and every statement is individual.”

Carey said, “I’m absolutely appalled that the person who we trust to be honest would present evidence in an official document that was false. “The fact that there’s history in that department presenting falsified police reports makes me extremely worried of the propriety of any reports coming out of that department.”

“It’s impossible to know whether it’s one bad apple or a culture of fraud and deceit,” she said.

I can see why people do it, but I can also see why people don’t like it.