Police Learn Writing Beyond Reports CHICAGO - Inside classrooms at the Chicago Police Academy, would-be officers learn how to make arrests, spot drugs, understand gang terminology, process crime scenes. But this class looked different: rows of sworn, longtime police officers listened silently to barked commands from an unlikely trainer - a novelist. "Don't dodge race, don't dodge sex, don't dodge the war on drugs because people told you they're winning it and you on the street know that they're not," said Charlie Newton, the writer, pounding his fist on a table. That's what you've got to talk about. If you're going to back away from that, you're wasting your time talking to me. I can tell you how to start. I'm really good at that, but I can't propel you through the fire you're getting ready to face. For the police officers here, a few in full uniform, this was not the everyday fire. Nor was it the usual training seminar; none of these officers, in fact, were required to be here. In a profession that plenty of professional writers without a single day spent in a squad car like to write about, the CHICAGO Police Department has begun a voluntary workshop for officers who wish to tell their own stories. So far, 25 do. Certainly, there are already accomplished officers-turned-authors and even a Public Safety Writers Association. But national law enforcement organizations say it is extremely unusual for such a workshop to come from a police department itself, where most of the training in writing involves incident reports and search warrant applications. Among these officers, not all were dreaming of writing crime thrillers. Some aspired to more offbeat genres - children's stories, self-help guides for police leadership, biographies of criminals, tales of weird cold cases, and at least one planned to modernize stories from the Bible by interweaving them with incidents from police work. "Every policeman has said more than once, "We have got to write a book," " said Sgt. Cynthia Schumann, a 26-year Chicago police veteran who said she had been jotting down her own notes, just words and bits and thoughts, for years. People would not believe - you can't make it up - what we've seen. It could be something very humorous, or it could be something very devastating and tragic. And Martin Preib, an officer who attended the seminar though he has already published a book, said an effort to help actual police officers tell their own stories was critical - overdue, even. "I think it's high time the publishing world listened to the police," said Officer Preib, a 10-year veteran who describes his writing as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. There is a wealth of literary possibilities there, but people in publishing are very politically correct and arrogant. They generally do not listen to the police, or dismiss their point of view in favor of clichés about the police. Still, the process - envisioning, writing, editing - will be anything but easy, warned Mr. Newton, whose second crime novel, "Start Shooting," was recently released. His fellow instructor, Jonathan Eig, the nonfiction author most recently of "Get Capone," described himself to the officers as the "good cop" to Mr. Newton's bad. The first steps, Mr. Newton said in sometimes profane terms, were to "kill" the internal critic and to decide not to hold back on touchy issues, whatever the discomfort. "Will you give yourself permission to tell the truth?" he called out to the officers. And if you won't, don't do this. Some officers later acknowledged that they worried about running afoul of department rules or irking their bosses by writing about their work. Like many other police departments, Chicago's has sometimes clashed with writers over what information should be made public and what should not. "I guess the biggest issue I have with myself is to give myself permission to actually deal with a felon," said Sara Sotgiu, an officer for 12 years. She said she might write about a gang leader, a contemporary in age, whom she arrested for punching a cab driver in her first weeks on the job. "I remember thinking, How is it that I'm where I am and he's where he is?" she said. How did we get to each other's lives from separate worlds? Lt. Maureen C. Biggane, commander of the department's Office of News Affairs who helped create the writing program after Mr. Newton and Mr. Eig volunteered to teach one, said she was not concerned that officers might violate protocols in their writing. The department decided to go forward with the program, she said, for a simple reason: to help officers pursue their interests beyond everyday police work. Whether many among the first group survive the occasional classroom meetings like this one, a continual back-and-forth via e-mail with the authors, or even the first homework assignment remains to be seen. Officers were asked to write 25 words or fewer on what their book would be about - words that, once rewritten over and over and ultimately boiled down to a single word, would serve to keep them from straying into tangents when they got around to actual writing. Ray Cox, a 21-year veteran who works in the department's evidence section amid drugs, guns and rape kits, wrote: "A bitter, divorced cop, calloused from witnessing hopelessness and despair on the Chicago streets. He struggles to find balance until three ladies impact his life. The authors sent it back, praised - and marked with ideas for revision. "My impression is they're dealing with powerful themes and terrific story lines, but nailing down the essence of what they want to say is going to take much time and many rewrites," Mr. Eig said of his sense so far. This is like psychotherapy, and the first impulse for these and other writers is to resist.