You never know when a police report you’ve written is going to make news.

On January 1, 1996, a Santa Monica police officer responded to a 911 phone call hang-up and talked to a woman who claimed her husband had abused her. Charges were later dropped when the woman – Mary Louise Piccard – missed a court appearance. She later said she’d been afraid to show up in court. The couple eventually divorced.

That police report is in the news because the alleged abuser – Stephen K. Bannon – is the new CEO of the campaign to elect Donald J. Trump to the Presidency.

The report is impressive. In 1996 many police reports – including this one – were handwritten. Although the officer did not have the advantage of a laptop to write on, the report is objective, thorough, and jargon free. The officer uses “I” to recount the events at the call.

Here are two objective statements that convincingly describe Piccard’s condition when the officer arrived:

I saw that her eyes were red and watery.

I saw red marks on her left wrist and the right side of her neck.

I have a few quibbles. A few words in the report are misspelled (including argument and a lot). But we need to remember that the report was written before spellcheckers were available.

For efficiency, I’d suggest omitting “upon my arrival” in this sentence:

Upon my arrival, I was met at the front door by X.

Here’s what’s really impressive: If you read the report carefully, you can tell that the writer has been to college. Take a look at this sentence, for example:

X said she spit at him and he reached up to her, from the driver’s seat of his car, and grabbed her left wrist.

The verb should be “spat,” but  otherwise this is an elegant sentence.

This officer deserves credit for an excellent report – and Santa Monica should be proud that it adopted sensible report-writing practices more than 20 years ago.

Here’s a question for you: If one of your reports turned up in a news story 20 years from now, would you – and your agency – be proud of what you’d written?