Homeland Security Editing and Proofreading Services

One suspicious activity report describes a man photographing a bridge, taking notes, and returning three times over two weeks. It does not say what separated the photography from the work of a hobbyist, a student, or a structural engineer with business there, or what the three visits add to a description fitting thousands of harmless people. The report is filed, indexed, and retained. The man's name now sits in a system built to find threats, attached to behavior thousands of people engage in innocently.

Suspicious activity reports and their review, threat assessment and warning products, fusion center bulletins and information-sharing products, and after-action reports following an exercise or a real event all go on a permanent file, and each one is edited here first. It also covers interagency coordination and liaison documentation, and training material explaining reporting thresholds to frontline staff. Our editors attend to writing that decides whose name enters a system, and why.

The articulated nexus to criminal or terrorist activity separates a report worth retaining from one that records ordinary behavior under a suspicious label, and it fails when the activity is described and the suspicion is left unstated. Photographing a bridge is not the finding. What made the photography suspicious in context is the finding, and a report that omits it has reported nothing.

A report needs to state what raised this behavior above an innocent explanation, because "acting suspiciously" is not an observation. A reviewer reading the file six months later cannot test a claim with no basis given. Behavior is better described in neutral, specific language than in characterizations that assume intent. "Loitering" and "standing near the service entrance for four minutes" describe the same event, and only one has already reached a conclusion.

Identifying details belong in a report only where they bear on the assessment. A report recording ethnicity, dress, or accent with no stated relevance invites the profiling the threshold exists to prevent. A report should also separate what was observed from what was inferred, because the two carry different weight, and a reviewer needs to know which is which. An officer who writes that a man "was casing the bridge" has recorded an inference; one who writes that he photographed the same span from three positions has recorded an observation.

The retention threshold should be applied consistently and stated in the report: a specific, articulable connection to unlawful activity rather than general unease. Reports that do not meet it are better documented as not meeting it than reworded until they pass. A closing line reading "no nexus to criminal or terrorist activity identified, not retained" costs one sentence, and it keeps a name out of the index. The same file closed with "subject engaged in apparent pre-operational surveillance" puts that name there for years. Reports written this way protect the usefulness of the system and the people who never should have entered it.

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including reports, assessments, and personnel information. We are editors, not intelligence analysts, law enforcement officers, or legal specialists, and we offer no opinion on threat assessment, retention decisions, or legal thresholds. What we can do is make sure the stated basis for suspicion is actually on the page.