Ep. 22: Paper That Holds: The Documentation Gap

A retail case is only as good as the paper underneath it. Don and Jim walk the documentation chain end to end. Jim draws on twenty-eight years of federal investigations to lay out what kills cases at the prosecution end. 

Don speaks from years owning and operating guard firms about where the same failure modes get introduced at the front of the chain. The witness who was never properly interviewed. The video that was overwritten. The pattern that lived in three different officers' logs and never got assembled. 

The motivated review that is coming for every operator whose paper was written for the moment instead of the next reader.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

This is the City Safe Podcast, a conversation at the intersection of community safety, technology, and leadership, co-hosted by Don Carr and Jim Kortz. Together, we examine the critical issues facing cities today and the smarter tools that can help reduce crime and protect our communities. From instant communication systems to emerging technology, we break down what works, what doesn't, and what's next for urban safety. Because in today's world, keeping people safe requires more than good intentions. It requires innovation, data, and decisive action. Listen to the City Safe Podcast, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube Music. Subscribe today and join the mission to make cities safer for everyone.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Thank you for joining us on the City Safe Podcast. This is episode 22. Paper that holds the documentation gap. Jim, this is a tactical episode. Five episodes of institutional shift. So today we go to the floor because the partnership, the prosecutor relationship, the pattern file, all of it sits on top of one thing: the paper. And the paper is breaking in places most operators don't even see until it's too late.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Yeah, you're right, Don. So documentation is where I spent a lot of my career on the receiving uh end of files that somebody else built. So, you know, over 28 years, I did investigations from child exploitation to COVID fraud to internal investigations with OIG. So, you know, those are three case types that really couldn't be more different. And the cases that fell apart, they fell apart at the documentation level, not the investigation level, but the documentation.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Well said, Jim. And that's what we're talking about today, that that documentation being the through line, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yeah, yep, the through line. So the same failure modes I saw at the federal level are baked into how retail and security operations document incidents today.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

And here's where I have to put my own card on the table. I owned and operated guard firms. I lived inside the documentation gap on both ends. The client side, where the AP director or the property manager needed the report to do something, and the internal end, where my officer's report had to clear their supervisor and their sergeant, and sometimes if it got up to me and my account manager, before it ever left the building or got sent anywhere. Yeah, and that's a vantage point most people just don't have. Yeah, Jim. It's a vantage I would rather not have. Um because it taught me how thin the system is. But I have it, so let's use it.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Yeah, so end to end, right? So I'll tell you uh what kills the case at the prosecution end, and you tell me where it gets introduced at the operational end.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

All right, let's go.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

So let's talk about the first failure mode, witness preservation. So the window in which you capture a clean statement is pretty short and unforgiving. You know, memories degrade, outside influences can become possible. And the case that gets prosecuted maybe eight months from now really lives or dies on what was captured on day one or day two by somebody who knew how to capture it.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

And if the first contact is handled wrong?

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Well, you don't always recover from it if that's the case. Witnesses' memories, you know, maybe were overwritten by a version that they told their manager, their spouse, their friends, and that clean recollection is just gone and you can't get it back.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

Understood. Let me bring this into my world now. The cashier who got threatened at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, the hotel clerk who watched something at the front desk that just didn't feel right, the leasing agent who saw something at 3 in the afternoon. The witness in my world is a line-level employee. The first interview, almost every time, is conducted by a manager in the back office. 20 minutes after the event, possibly with the witness still in shock, not trained to do interviews, writing a paragraph and an incident report that captures maybe 20% of what the witness actually saw.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

And that statement is not preserved.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Exactly. The statement is not preserved, and the witness's actual words and the witness's own writing almost never get captured. And then six months pass. The cashier left the company, the hotel clerk transferred to a different property, the leasing agent moved into a different industry entirely. And by the time anybody needs that statement, the witness is gone. And what you have is a paragraph somebody else wrote about what she said.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Right. So different stakes, but the same structural problem. The same structural problem indeed, Jim. So let's go to now the second failure mode: chain of custody. So evidence in a modern case is largely digital. You know, records, video communications, transaction histories. The case stands up only if every piece can be traced from the moment it was collected to the moment it lands in front of that jury. Who handled it, when, how it was stored, and whether or not it was modified.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

And you know as well as anybody, Jim, the defense attacks that chain of custody.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Oh, yeah, the lawyers attack that that chain, right? Because if I can't prove that the evidence I'm showing the jury is the same evidence that was collected on a specific date by a specific person in a specific way, then the case can fall apart. I don't, you know, I have a story, and the jury sends a story home.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

Well said. Now, bringing that into my world video on a retail or hospitality or a multifamily property pulled by a manager, saved to a thumb drive. Walked across the parking lot, handed it to a local detective or investigator three days later, possibly emailed it to corporate, and they possibly transferred it again at the corporate level. Nobody documenting any of it. By the time that lands in front of a prosecutor, the chain's not only broken, it's been broken fivefold. The video's intact. But that chain, it's still broken. Same effect, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah, same effect.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

And I think it even gets a little worse on the security side, Jim, because there's that extra layer, right? That that guard officer writes an incident report at the end of the shift. Supervisors read it the next morning. Account managers read it sometime that week. Client receives a copy when the account manager gets to it. Each handoff is a chance to lose detail, to change wording, to drop an attachment, or worse, to replace the document with maybe a cleaner version that nobody can later authenticate.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Well, each handoff is a chain of custody event that really nobody documents. Right. And I lived inside that space for years.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

I knew it was happening, but I could not fix it at the contract rate clients paid us to provide services because fixing that structural problem are not part of the services we provide.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Right. And so that brings us to the third failure mode, internal investigations. So that's kind of where I was, you know, in OIG. So the subject of an internal investigation, it might be a coworker, a contractor, or somebody embedded in the organization somehow. So your documentation has to be clear, kind of on a higher bar from the start, right? Because everything you write is going to be read eventually by people who have a stake in the outcome being different from what you found.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

Right. And I think that says it pretty plainly.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah. So legal's going to read my file, right? The subjects council is going to read my file. Um, sometimes another agency reads it. HR will eventually get their hands on it. So the standard's not whether your investigation was really correct. The standard is whether your documentation supports the conclusion in a way that survives all that motivated review.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Well articulated, Jim. Motivated review. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Yeah, people reading your file who want it to be weak.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Precisely. That that phrase should land hard on every operator listening, really, because the same standard applies on the operational side. Their internal theft case, the employee fraud case, the harassment case that involves a security officer, the wrongful termination claim that came back at the guard company 18 months after the officer was fired for cause. All of those get read by people who have an institutional interest in the file being thin.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Right. And the file written for the moment won't survive that read.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Right. And the operator who wrote it was not thinking about that. They were thinking about closing their shift. Jim, one more thread. This one's mine. The internal communication gap inside a guard firm.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Okay, let's hear it.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Say I have a post officer on a property. He writes a shift log at the end of his eight hours. The next officer comes on. She doesn't read the previous officer's log. The supervisor, doing patrol rounds at 1 a.m., checks in by phone, but does not see the logs that night. The account manager reviews the week's logs on Friday morning, scanning for things that need to go to the client. The client gets a curated weekly report on Monday. Okay, so in that chain, what gets lost? Well, where do I start? Uh patterns. The same vehicle, the same individual, the same time of night, seen by three different officers over three different shifts, documented in three different logs, never assembled until something happens. And what happens? The lawyer asks for those records.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Okay, so we have distributed observation, but no central assembly. So the pattern was always there, but no one on the operational side really connected it.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

And that sums it up. No one on the operational side ever connected it. And the cost of not connecting it gets paid later by somebody who had nothing to do with the original observation. The guest who got hurt, the employee who got fired, the company that got sued. Okay, Don, so bring it all together for us. Well, simply put, documentation is not a paperwork problem.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Yeah, so documentation isn't an investigation problem solved like 12 months early. The case that gets prosecuted next year is going to turn on a witness statement that should have been taken maybe this year, or a piece of evidence that should have been preserved this year, a pattern that should have been assembled across three shifts this year. So by people who don't yet know there's going to be a case.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

And that burden falls on the operator. Nobody else can carry that.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yeah, right. No one else can carry it.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

All right. And in closing, land this one. Monday morning. What does an operator do?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Well, three things. First, witness statements in the first day or two. And the witness's own words, preserved where they can't be edited.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Second.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

I would say chain of custody on every piece of evidence that touches everyone's hands. You know, video pools, photographs, statements, log entries, who handled it, when, how it moved. It's boring discipline, but that saves your case.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

And what's third?

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Well, I would say that's the assembly problem. Somebody in the organization has to be reading across logs, across shifts, across properties, because the pattern is the case. And the pattern only exists if somebody is looking at it.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

Yeah. Same answer in my language is train your frontline to write for the next reader. Uh, not for the moment. Pay your supervisors for review time, not just patrol time. And don't let a single piece of paper leave your hands without a record of where it went, who it went to, and how it got there.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

All right. So two languages, but one answer. All right. Cases don't die at the courtroom.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

No, they die at the incident. 18 months earlier. And the report nobody read, and the log nobody assembled, and the witness, nobody preserved. And that's the whole episode. That's the whole episode indeed, Jim. And remember, stay well, stay aware. And stay city safe.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

That wraps up this episode of the City Safe Podcast. Thanks for joining us in the conversation about smarter strategies for safer cities. If you found today's discussion valuable, share it with your network and help us spread awareness about the tools and technology making a real impact. Be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube Music so you never miss an episode. Until next time, stay informed, stay connected, and stay city safe.