What is an incident report?
An incident report is the officer's written record of something that happened on site — what occurred, when, who was involved, what was done. It may later be used in evidence.
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<img src="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/incident-report/diagram.svg" alt="incident report — diagram from SecureOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/incident-report">What is an incident report?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk">SecureOptix</a>
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</figure>It is written close to the event for a reason. Detail degrades quickly, and a report written the next day is a summary of a memory rather than a record of an event.
It may end up in a criminal or civil proceeding, which sets the standard it should be written to: factual, chronological, distinguishing what the officer saw from what they were told and from what they concluded.
Incidents also aggregate into something useful. A pattern of similar reports at one site is intelligence about a security problem, and it is usually invisible because each report is filed and read once.
In practice
A retail unit, a confrontation at the fire exit, written up the next morning.
The officer is honest and his memory is ordinary. He writes that the man was aggressive and had been trying to force the door. Both are conclusions, and when the footage is reviewed the sequence is slightly different from the order he remembered.
Nothing in the account was invented. It is simply a reconstruction, and a reconstruction written after sleep is checkable against CCTV in a way that will not flatter it.
What survives is what was written at the time, in sequence, describing what was seen rather than what it meant — 'pulling at the base of the door with both hands' rather than 'trying to force it'.
What goes wrong in practice
- Written retrospectively at the end of a shift or later.
- Conclusions and opinions mixed with observations, which weakens the report in any proceeding.
- Personal data recorded without regard to data protection obligations.
- Reports filed per site with nobody looking across them for patterns.