Finns det vapen i bilen? : Om Polisens protokollföring av brottsförebyggande tvångsmedelsanvändning

Sammanfattning: This qualitative study examines police protocols documenting the use of certain coercivemeasures from a plain language perspective. The use of plain language has developed in the last sixty years and is today a well-established norm for the authorities official writing in Sweden. Earlier research shows that police officers’ interest in writing is low and that producing protocols and other texts takes a lot of time away from other activities. The protocols could potentially be used for different purposes, e.g., in providing officers with relevant information when deciding if an individual should be checked on, for police method evaluation, and as a legal security for the individual subject to the measure. This study shows that the examined protocols display in explicitness connected to vagueness in certain recurring categories of grounds for using the measures in question. The comprehensibility ofthe protocols is generally good, with a few exceptions connected to the use of law enforcement jargon and legal terms that can be difficult for people not familiar with judicial language to understand. The choice of words and the construction of sentences are mostly simple and well in line with the plain language ideal. The study concludes that the protocols’ descriptions of the reasons grounding the use of the measures in question need to be more explicit for the protocols to be used for the purposes named above. For this reason, the study suggests that the writing situation for the police officers should be eased, perhaps by producing templatesthat can be used as support when composing the protocols.