Zachary Duncan

Suzanne Ingram
UWRT 1104-037
11/14/16
Multi-Genre Project Reflection
My Multi-Genre Project is based on the inquiry question, How do Police Officers cope
with stress following and intense call or case? My target audience is Law Enforcement Officials
themselves. The age range for my audience is very wide, being twenty-one years and older.
The reason it is so large is because to become a police officer you must be at least 21. They
live in the United States and have gone through Basic Law Enforcement Training, or BLET
for short. Most of them have obtained some sort of degree that is not limited to Criminal
Justice or Criminology. If you ask any of them, they will tell you that they do not do it for
the money, because they do not make as much as they should in my opinion, but that is a
whole other topic for a whole different paper. Some will tell you that they do it because they
love to protect the community in which they reside and to serve the community they grew
up in. They value their families, the safety of the citizens they are protecting, and being
respected for what they do. Some of them know quite a bit about my inquiry question either
because they have experienced it themselves or had a close brother or sister in blue to have to
face it. The reasoning for not all of them not knowing a lot about my topic is because some
officers will never have to go through any intense cases or calls in their time as an officer.
The way that they can obtain information on my topic is through their departments and

counseling services. A lot of the departments send out daily e-mails that sometimes pertain
to my topic.
The sole purpose of my paper is to let the officers that are serving our community
that they do have people in their jurisdiction that care about them and back them through all
that they do. I believe the main reason for me writing about this topic is because I have
interned with five various police departments, so I have a personal connection with law
enforcement.
I used a wide variety of sources to help me with my paper. One of my keystone
sources was my interview with Lt. Jamey Fletcher with the Maiden Police Department. My
interview with him showed me that not all police officers react the same and have the same
emotional ties with a call that others do. Some cases that some officers would say are very
intense, may just [be] a regular day at work, as Lt. Fletcher puts it. Another keystone
source was my other interview with Sergeant Brett Williams with the Newton Police
Department. His interview displayed that officers still have human reactions to topics that
hit close to home with them. He says that Certain things just stick with you. He says that
him doing CPR on that 2 year old will never fully leave his mind because he could only think
how he would have felt if it was his daughter. The video included with Colin Chocolas
review displayed an officer having the human reaction of crying after having to shoot a
suspect.
I honestly chose my two genres because I felt that it would be the easiest to display
the two completely different reactions of police officers regarding intense cases. My genres
would exist on an online article or in a newspaper. My audience would gain access to them

through their department. I believe my online poster should come first and then my
newspaper article including Lt. Fletchers story. I used Ethos to tie in my audience
emotionally and Logos to pull them in logically. I believe my project was put together at a
very strong time in our community with all the riots and everything going on. I think my
genre pieces would hit home with a lot of my audience.