The policies, procedures and directives of any given department are an incredible resource for figuring out how it operates, how it handles records, what records it creates, where those records are and most importantly, what employees and the entity are allowed, and not allowed, to do.
Policies, procedures and directives of police departments are especially helpful following use of force incidents and when an officer is accused of misconduct.
Having those documents allows you to see what the policy is and directly see if it was violated.
These are also the same documents the officers are reading and relying on to make their own judgement calls, and how to conduct themselves.
