Glossary

Law enforcement terms, in plain words.

The vocabulary that turns up in bodycam and dashcam footage: what each term means, what it does not mean, and the phrasing you are likely to have heard it in.

157 terms15 categories

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Every term, alphabetically. Definitions for all of them follow below, grouped by subject.

0-9

A

B

D

E

F

G

Go ahead

H

I

K

L

Less-lethal

M

N

O

P

R

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U

V

W

17 terms

Radio & Dispatch

The shorthand officers and dispatchers use to move information quickly.

10-code: Numeric radio shorthand, where a two-part number stands in for a whole phrase. The system exists to keep transmissions short and consistent, not to obscure them.
10-4: Acknowledged, or understood. One of the few 10-codes recognized consistently across agencies, which is why it survived into ordinary speech.
Copy / Copy that: I heard and understood the transmission. Confirms receipt only; it is not agreement, and it is not a commitment to act.
Affirmative: Yes. Preferred over yes on the radio because it survives a bad signal, where a clipped yes can be lost entirely.
Negative: No. Used for the same reason as affirmative: it is hard to mistake for anything else over a poor connection.
Disregard: Ignore or cancel what was just said. Often heard when a call is resolved, a description is corrected, or units are no longer needed.
Stand by: Wait. Either because the person speaking is busy, or because more information is coming.
Go ahead: Proceed with your transmission. A radio channel carries one voice at a time, so this is the handoff that keeps two people from talking over each other.
Clear: Depends entirely on context. It can mean finished with a call, available for another one, or that a place has been checked and nobody is there.
En route: Traveling to the call. Marks the point where an officer has accepted an assignment and is moving toward it.
On scene: The officer has arrived. Worth noting in footage, because it is the timestamp everything afterwards is measured from.
Code 3: Emergency response, commonly meaning lights and siren and an authorization to exceed some ordinary traffic rules.
BOLOBe On the Lookout: A broadcast asking officers to watch for a particular person, vehicle or item, usually with a description attached. It is a request for attention, not authority to arrest.
ATLAttempt to Locate: A request that officers try to find a specific person or vehicle. Common for welfare checks and missing persons as well as for suspects.
APBAll-Points Bulletin: An older, broader term for circulating information about a wanted person or vehicle, often across multiple agencies.
CADComputer-Aided Dispatch: The system dispatchers use to create, assign and track calls for service. It is also the record that later shows what officers were told and when.
Call for service: Any incident or request that sends police to a location. The starting point for most footage: what officers were told before they arrived is rarely what they find.

8 terms

People & Roles

What each label for a person in an incident does and does not claim.

Complainant: The person making the complaint or reporting the incident. Being the complainant carries no finding about who was at fault.
RPReporting Party: Whoever called it in. Frequently not a participant at all, which is one reason the initial description over the radio so often differs from what officers find.
Subject: A person involved in an encounter or investigation. Deliberately neutral: it says someone is the focus of attention, nothing more.
Suspect: A person believed to have possibly committed an offense. A belief held by an investigator, not a finding by a court.
Victim: A person alleged or determined to have been harmed by an offense. Early in a call the label is provisional, and it sometimes moves.
Witness: A person believed to have observed something relevant. What a witness reports and what a camera recorded are separate accounts, and comparing them is often the whole story.
POIPerson of Interest: An informal investigative designation for someone police want to speak to or learn more about. It is not a charge and carries no legal consequence by itself.
Known to police: Police already hold information involving that person. It does not necessarily mean a criminal history: prior contact as a witness, a caller or a welfare check counts too.

14 terms

Records & Database Checks

Running plates, licenses and names, and what comes back when they do.

NCICNational Crime Information Center: The FBI-administered system holding records such as warrants, stolen property and missing persons, queried by agencies across the country.
Run the plate: Check a license plate against registration and related records. Usually the first thing that happens on a traffic stop, often before the officer leaves the car.
Run the VIN: Check the Vehicle Identification Number, the identifier stamped on the vehicle itself. Useful when a plate and a vehicle do not appear to match.
Run someone: Query a person's identifying details through law enforcement databases, typically for license status, warrants and prior contacts.
Return: The information that comes back from a database query. A return describes what a record system holds, which is not always current or correct.
Registered owner / RO: The person or entity listed as the vehicle's registered owner. The registered owner is not necessarily the driver, and records lag behind private sales.
DLDriver's license: A driver's license, and by extension the record behind it. Most roadside conversations about paperwork are really about the status attached to this record.
Suspended: Driving privileges temporarily withdrawn. A suspension usually ends after a set period or once a specified requirement is met.
Revoked: Driving privileges withdrawn, generally requiring an additional process before they can be restored rather than simply lapsing back into effect.
Valid: The license or registration is currently in effect according to the system queried. A statement about a record, not a judgment about the driver.
Warrant hit: A database query indicating a possible outstanding warrant. A hit is a lead rather than a conclusion, which is why the next step is to confirm it.
Confirm the warrant: Check with the agency that issued a warrant that it is still active and that they still want the person picked up. Records can be stale, and confirmation is what closes that gap.
Extradition: The process for transferring a wanted person from one jurisdiction to another. Often the reason a confirmed warrant still does not result in someone being held.
Pickup radius: The geographic limit within which an issuing agency will actually come and collect someone on a warrant. Outside it, they may decline, and the person is released.

14 terms

Stops, Detention & Rights

The legal standards behind a stop, and the line between detained and arrested.

Traffic stop: A police detention of a vehicle, generally based on an alleged violation or on reasonable suspicion. Everyone in the vehicle is detained for its duration, not just the driver.
Felony stop / high-risk stop: A vehicle stop conducted with heightened tactics because officers perceive elevated danger, commonly involving weapons, a stolen vehicle, a serious felony or a wanted person. Occupants are usually directed out one at a time at gunpoint.
Reasonable suspicion: Specific, articulable facts supporting suspicion that criminal activity is occurring or has occurred. Generally the standard associated with a brief investigative detention, and a lower bar than probable cause.
Probable cause / PC: A higher evidentiary threshold than reasonable suspicion, generally required for an arrest and for many searches and warrants. It concerns the facts known at the time, not what is proved later.
Terry stop: A brief investigative detention based on reasonable suspicion, named after the Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio. Short of an arrest, and limited in scope to resolving the suspicion.
Terry frisk: A limited pat-down for weapons, permitted when an officer reasonably suspects a detained person is armed and dangerous. It is for officer safety, not for finding evidence.
Detained: Temporarily not free to leave while police investigate. Not an arrest, and the distinction matters: a detention is meant to be brief and limited to the reason for it.
Arrested / in custody: The person has been taken into legal custody. Being in custody is also the trigger for the interrogation protections associated with Miranda.
Custodial arrest: An arrest where the person is physically taken into custody, rather than cited and released at the scene. It is the difference between going to jail and getting a piece of paper.
Cuff / cuffed: Handcuffed. Handcuffing does not by itself mean someone has been arrested; officers also handcuff during detentions they describe as precautionary.
Miranda warning: The advisement of certain constitutional rights associated with custodial interrogation, from Miranda v. Arizona. It is tied to questioning in custody, not to the moment of arrest.
Mirandized: Given a Miranda warning. Officers often note it on camera precisely so the record shows when it happened.
Custodial interrogation: Questioning by law enforcement while a person is in custody, under circumstances likely to draw out incriminating responses. The combination of custody and questioning is what makes it custodial.
Invoke: To assert a legal right, such as the right to remain silent or the right to counsel. Courts have generally expected the assertion to be clear rather than implied.

12 terms

Searches, Seizure & Property

The grounds offered for a search, and what happens to what is found.

Consent search: A search carried out because someone with authority over the place or item agreed to it. Consent is the one basis that requires no independent legal justification, which is why it is asked for so often.
Plain view: A doctrine that may permit seizing evidence or contraband an officer lawfully observes from a place they are lawfully allowed to be. The observation has to be lawful first; the doctrine does not create a right to go looking.
Search incident to arrest: A recognized warrant exception permitting certain searches connected to a lawful arrest, traditionally justified by officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence.
Probable-cause search: A search conducted on probable cause where a recognized exception to the warrant requirement applies. The phrase describes the justification, not a distinct type of search.
Vehicle exception / automobile exception: A doctrine permitting certain warrantless searches of a vehicle when probable cause exists, resting historically on a vehicle's mobility and the reduced expectation of privacy in one.
Inventory search: An administrative accounting of property, most often in an impounded vehicle, conducted under standardized procedure rather than as a hunt for evidence. Anything found is still evidence, which is why the procedural part matters.
Pat-down / frisk: A limited external search of clothing, usually for weapons. Not the same as a full evidentiary search, and not a license to empty pockets.
Contraband: Items unlawful to possess under the law that applies. What qualifies changes with the jurisdiction and, increasingly, with the year.
K-9 alert: A trained police dog giving its trained indication that it has detected a target odour. What counts as an alert depends on how that dog was trained to signal.
Canine sniff: Using a trained dog to detect specified odours, commonly around the exterior of a vehicle during a stop. Case law has treated the timing and the location of the sniff as significant.
Impound: Police taking custody of a vehicle, whether because it is evidence, because it cannot lawfully be left, or because nobody present can lawfully drive it.
Tow inventory: The documentation of what was in a vehicle when it was towed or impounded. Intended to protect the owner's property and the agency alike.

6 terms

Evidence & Recording

How incidents get recorded, and how what is collected is accounted for.

Evidence: Material collected because it may be relevant to an investigation or prosecution. Collection is not a finding: what is gathered at a scene includes things that turn out to mean nothing.
Chain of custody: The documentation tracking who held and handled a piece of evidence from collection onward. A gap in the chain is one of the standard ways evidence gets challenged.
Body-worn camera / BWC: An officer-mounted recording camera. It captures one position, one field of view and one vantage point, which is a narrower record than it can appear to be.
Dashcam / MVRMobile Video Recorder: A vehicle-mounted recording system. Often triggered automatically by the emergency lights, and frequently paired with a wireless microphone on the officer.
Axon: A major manufacturer of body cameras, conducted energy weapons and evidence management systems. Its products are common enough that officers sometimes use the brand name as the generic term.
Pre-event buffer: A body camera feature that retains video from a short period before the officer pressed record, so the moments leading up to activation are not lost.

10 terms

Use of Force

Force options and the language used to describe and justify them.

Use of force: Physical force used by an officer to accomplish a lawful objective. The term covers far more than shootings: a firm grip to guide someone into a car seat is a use of force and is reported as one.
UOFUse of force: The abbreviation, usually seen in the context of reporting: a UOF report is the document an agency requires after force is used.
Less-lethal: A force option intended to reduce the probability of death compared with a firearm. Less-lethal is not the same as harmless, and not the same as incapable of killing.
CEWConducted Energy Weapon: A device that delivers an electrical current to interfere with muscle control, the TASER being the best known. Usually fires two probes on wires.
Drive stun: Pressing a conducted energy weapon directly against the body rather than firing its probes. It causes pain but generally does not produce the muscle incapacitation that probes can.
OC sprayOleoresin capsicum: Pepper spray. An inflammatory agent that affects the eyes and airways, and one that frequently affects the officer deploying it and anyone nearby.
Baton: An impact weapon carried by some officers, often collapsible. Departments generally restrict where on the body it may be used.
Deadly force: Force that creates a substantial risk of causing death or serious bodily injury. It is defined by that risk rather than by the weapon or the outcome.
Crossfire: Officers positioned so that firing at a threat would put another officer in the line of fire. A recurring subject in post-incident review, because positioning tends to happen fast and by accident.
Backdrop: What lies behind the intended target and could be struck by a round that misses or passes through. Considering it is part of the decision to shoot, not an afterthought.

12 terms

Tactics & Scene Control

Positioning, roles and containment: the part of a scene that looks like chaos.

Cover: An object or position offering meaningful protection from a threat, particularly gunfire. An engine block is cover; a car door usually is not.
Concealment: Something that hides a person without necessarily stopping a bullet. Useful, and routinely mistaken for cover in the moment.
Contact officer: The officer doing the talking and the physical work with the subject. Splitting these roles is deliberate: the person handling someone cannot also be watching everything else.
Cover officer: The officer watching for threats and protecting the contact officer. Often the one standing back and apparently doing nothing, which is the job.
Backup: Additional officers requested or already responding. How many arrive is often a function of what else is happening in the area rather than the seriousness of this call.
Perimeter: Officers positioned around an area to keep a person or a scene inside it. A perimeter set early and loosely tends to work better than one set late and tightly.
Containment: Preventing a person or threat from leaving a controlled area, so that the situation can be resolved on the officers' timing rather than in motion.
Staging: Holding officers or other resources at a designated spot until they are needed. Common with medical crews, who wait at a distance until a scene is called safe.
Scene security: Controlling an incident location to protect the people in it, the officers working it, and the evidence in it. Usually the reason bystanders are told to move back.
Clear a building: Systematically checking a structure for people or threats, room by room. Slow by design, and one of the more dangerous things officers do routinely.
Fatal funnel: A doorway, hallway or similar narrow space where a person is exposed and has nowhere to go. The reason officers move through doorways the way they do.
Officer safety: The broad justification offered for precautions meant to reduce immediate risk to officers or others. Because it is broad, it is worth noting what specific risk is being described when it is invoked.

15 terms

DUI & Field Sobriety

Impaired driving investigations, from roadside testing to chemical tests.

DUIDriving Under the Influence: Operating a vehicle while impaired by alcohol, drugs or both. The most widely recognized label for the offense, though not the one every state uses.
DWIDriving While Intoxicated / Impaired: The same general offense under a different name. Some states use DWI and DUI for distinct offenses at different levels of impairment.
OWI / OVIOperating While Intoxicated / Operating a Vehicle Impaired: State-specific names for impaired driving offenses. The word operating is doing work: in some states it reaches conduct short of driving.
SFSTStandardized Field Sobriety Tests: A battery of three roadside tests, standardized through NHTSA training: horizontal gaze nystagmus, the walk-and-turn, and the one-leg stand.
HGNHorizontal Gaze Nystagmus: The involuntary jerking of the eyes as they track an object to the side, and the first of the three standardized field sobriety tests. The officer moves a stimulus, usually a pen or a fingertip, and watches the eyes rather than the person.
Walk-and-Turn: A standardized divided-attention test: nine heel-to-toe steps along a line, a specific turn, and nine back, while listening to instructions. The scoring is about the divided attention as much as the balance.
One-Leg Stand: A standardized divided-attention test: stand on one foot, the other raised about six inches, and count aloud until told to stop.
Clues: The specific observations officers are trained to look for and count during field sobriety tests. Each test has a defined list, and the count is what the conclusion rests on.
PBTPreliminary / Portable Breath Test: A handheld roadside breath test. Generally used to help establish grounds for an arrest rather than as the evidentiary measurement itself.
Breathalyzer: The common term for breath-alcohol testing equipment, usually meaning the evidentiary instrument at the station rather than the handheld device roadside.
BACBlood Alcohol Concentration: The measured concentration of alcohol, reported as a percentage. Sometimes written as blood alcohol content, and often estimated from breath rather than measured from blood.
Implied consent: The state-law framework attaching chemical testing obligations, and consequences for refusing, to the privilege of driving. It is the reason a refusal can carry a penalty of its own.
Refusal: A driver declining a requested chemical test. Often a separate matter from the impaired driving allegation, with its own consequences.
Chemical test: Breath, blood or in some places urine testing for alcohol or drugs. Distinguished from the roadside tests, which measure performance rather than substance.
DREDrug Recognition Expert: An officer with specialised training in evaluating suspected drug impairment, called in when impairment is apparent but alcohol does not explain it.

6 terms

Drugs & Possession

Substances, the theories of possession, and what a roadside test is worth.

Narcotics: Used colloquially by police to mean illegal drugs generally, though the pharmacological and statutory senses of the word are narrower.
Possession: Having legally recognized possession or control of prohibited property. Closer to control than to touching, which is where constructive possession comes in.
Constructive possession: The theory that a person can possess something without holding it, where the required knowledge and control can be established. The usual answer to nobody claiming the item in a car with four people in it.
Intent to distribute: An allegation that a controlled substance was held for distribution rather than personal use, typically argued from quantity, packaging, scales, cash or messages.
Paraphernalia: Items associated with using, preparing, storing or concealing drugs. Many are ordinary objects, which is why the legal definitions lean on context and intent.
Field test: A preliminary on-scene test of a suspected substance, usually a color-change reagent kit. Presumptive by design, with laboratory confirmation coming later.

5 terms

Pursuits & Fleeing

Vehicle and foot pursuits, and the techniques used to end them.

Eluding / fleeing: Failing to stop for police, or attempting to escape from them, in a vehicle. Usually an offense in its own right, separate from whatever prompted the stop.
Foot pursuit: An officer chasing someone on foot. Many agencies now govern these by policy the way they do vehicle pursuits, because the risks are comparable and the control is worse.
PIT maneuverPrecision Immobilization Technique: Deliberate contact with the rear quarter of a fleeing vehicle to make it rotate and lose traction, bringing it to a stop. Executed at speed it is a serious use of force, and agencies limit it accordingly.
Stop sticks / spike strips: Tire-deflation devices deployed across a road to end a pursuit. Meant to deflate gradually rather than blow a tire out, and dangerous to the officer deploying them.
Rolling roadblock: Police vehicles maneuvering around a fleeing or target vehicle to slow it progressively, or to hold traffic back from it. Also used to clear a stretch of road ahead of an incident.

12 terms

Offenses & Charges

How offenses are classified, and how an allegation is formally made.

Criminal trespass: Unlawfully entering or remaining on property under the applicable statute. Frequently the offense behind a call that began as a refusal to leave.
Disorderly conduct: An offense covering specified disruptive conduct. One of the broadest and most variable offenses in use, which is why footage of one rarely settles the argument about it.
Obstruction: Interfering with specified governmental or law enforcement activity. What counts as interference is statutory, and words alone are treated differently from physical acts.
Resisting: Resisting a lawful arrest or detention, as the jurisdiction defines it. Some states distinguish passive resistance from active or forcible resistance; others do not.
Battery on an officer: Unlawful physical contact with an officer under the applicable state law. Often charged more seriously than the same contact with anyone else.
Assault on an officer: Depending on the state, either a threat or attempt to injure an officer, or actual injury. The line between assault and battery is drawn differently from place to place.
Felony: The more serious class of criminal offense, generally carrying potential imprisonment beyond a year. The classification drives much of what follows, from bail to collateral consequences.
Misdemeanor: A criminal classification less serious than a felony, but still criminal, and still capable of carrying jail time in many states.
Infraction / violation: A lower-level offense, often noncriminal, typically resolved by a fine. Most traffic matters sit here.
Citation: A formal notice alleging an offense, frequently allowing release at the scene instead of a custodial arrest. A citation is an allegation, not a finding.
Summons: A legal notice requiring a person to appear in court. Failing to appear tends to create a new and separate problem.
Charge: A criminal offense formally alleged against a person. A charge is not a conviction, and the charge an officer names at a scene is not always the one that is filed.

7 terms

Supervision & Court Orders

Probation, parole and the orders that restrict contact or access.

Probation: Court-ordered supervision in the community, imposed instead of or alongside incarceration, with conditions attached.
Parole: Supervised release following a period of incarceration. Distinct from probation, which generally replaces incarceration rather than following it.
Probation violation / VOP: An alleged breach of probation conditions. Can be a new offense, or something that is only a problem because of the conditions, like missing a meeting or leaving the county.
Parole violation: An alleged breach of the conditions of parole or supervised release, handled through its own process rather than as an ordinary new charge.
No-contact order: A court order prohibiting specified contact with another person. Frequently the reason a call about someone simply being present becomes an arrest.
Protective order / order of protection: A court order imposing restrictions intended to protect another person, which can cover contact, distance, residence and firearms.
Trespass warning: Formal notice that a person is not permitted to remain on, or return to, specified property. It is what makes a later return chargeable as trespass.

13 terms

Booking & Court Process

What happens after an arrest, from booking through to disposition.

Booked: Processed into a jail or detention system after arrest: identification, searching, property inventory, photograph and prints.
Mugshot / booking photo: The photograph taken during booking. It records an arrest, not an outcome, which is worth remembering given how widely these circulate.
Bond / bail: The mechanisms and conditions governing release before trial. Money is only one form; conditions, supervision and monitoring are others.
ROR / OR releaseRelease on Own Recognizance: Release without posting money, on a promise to appear and subject to conditions.
Arraignment: An early court proceeding where charges are formally presented, and where plea and release conditions may be addressed.
Plea: The defendant's formal response to a charge. A no-contest plea is not an admission in the same sense as guilty, though it can carry the same result in the case.
Dismissed: The charge or case is terminated without a conviction on it. Dismissal can happen for many reasons, and it is not the same as a finding of innocence.
Acquitted: Found not guilty after adjudication. Means the case was not proved to the required standard, which is a different statement from proving it did not happen.
Convicted: Found guilty, or having entered a guilty or no-contest plea that the court accepted and that results in a conviction.
Disposition: The current or final procedural outcome of a charge or case. The field to look at when an arrest is reported without saying what came of it.
Nolle prosequi / nolle pros: The prosecutor declining to proceed with a charge. A decision by the state rather than a ruling by the court, though a court records it.
Diversion: An alternative process that may allow charges to be dismissed or reduced once specified requirements are completed.
Deferred adjudication: The court holds off on a final finding while the defendant completes conditions. Completing them may avoid a conviction; failing them usually does not leave things where they were.

6 terms

Warrants

Judicial authorizations, what they permit, and how they are accounted for.

Search warrant: Judicial authorization to search specified places, people or items. Its scope is set by the document, which is why what a warrant covers is often the argument.
Arrest warrant: Judicial authorization to arrest a specified person. Distinct from a search warrant, and it does not by itself authorize searching a place to find them.
Affidavit: A sworn statement of facts, commonly the document used to establish probable cause for a warrant. Sworn, which is what makes a false statement in one a serious matter.
Return on warrant: The documentation showing how a warrant was carried out and, for a search, generally what was seized. The accounting that closes the loop a warrant opened.
Bench warrant: A warrant issued by a judge from the bench, most often for failing to appear or to comply with a court order rather than for a new offense.
Failure to appear / FTA: An allegation that a person did not attend a required court proceeding. Commonly the reason behind a warrant that has nothing to do with the original allegation.