Proper use of stated.

I'm a police officer and recently had a debate with a fellow officer on the proper use of the word "stated." Now, I consider myself an above average writer in my field; which isn't saying much considering my colleagues commonly compose police reports that a 6th grader would be embarrassed of. Anyway, police reports are very straightforward, no-frills, and to the point. My department emphasized us to keep the reports simple. A large portion of our reports are summarizing our interviews with people. Depending on the incident; this can make the report very long. Many officers will do the following: "John stated he was mad. John stated he yelled at Cletus, but did not hit him. John stated he wanted to leave." Although technically nothing is wrong with this; to me, it makes the report a boring read. I will use stated, but mix in words such as "said," "told me," etc... to try to keep the report from sounding so repetitive. Anyway, one of my co-workers said that everyone on the department writes improper police reports. He said that we need to use quotations marks after every time we use the word stated.

Lequanda stated that she was angry because Jamarkie had an affair with her sister. This would be incorrect according to my co-worker.

Lequanda stated, "Dat motha fucka fucked my motha fuckin fam Joe!" According to my co-worker this sentence would be correct. I agree that it's correct. However, you can see how using direct quotes all the time could be confusing to the reader.

This officer said that the aforementioned quotation rule only applied when “stated” was used. So according to him the following sentence would be okay: Lequanda said that she was angry because Jamarkie had an affair with her sister. I looked up several of this officers reports and found the following pattern:

Jimmy said he was hungry. Jimmy said his wife did not make him anything to eat. Jimmy said he was upset by his wife's decision. Jimmy stated, "Officer, that Bitch better listen to me or I'm gonna kill her!" I told Jimmy to relax. Jimmy said he was sorry.

Sorry for the long post, but I tried searching Google and could not find anything that addressed this. Hopefully, because it is completely false. If anybody could chime in and let me know if this rule exists, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm about 99 percent sure I'm right, but would feel better with some assurance. Once again, my questions is: do you have to provide a direct quote every time after you use the word "stated."