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COP 101: Introduction to Police Language. Police is a very complicated language which may be intimidating to beginning individuals. But with sufficient patience and effort its basic structures can be apprehended by most particular individuals. For example, police makes a distinction between exclusive responsibility for action and inclusive responsibility for action. When a suspect individual shoots a Police speaker, we use the simple active voice verb: “Dorner shot a police officer today.” When a Police speaker shoots at a suspect individual, however, the passive voice or related subject-less constructions are used to express officer-involved actions: “There was an officer-involved shooting today,” “Shots were fired moments earlier in a nearby area where LAPD officers were standing guard outside the home of someone targeted in an online manifesto that authorities have attributed to Dorner,” etc.