Security incident report. A printable incident report — what happened, in sequence, in the officer's own words, with the detail that is still useful when somebody reads it two years later.

An incident report is written for somebody who was not there and will read it long afterwards — a client, an insurer, a court. That is why the account is in time order and in the officer's own words: a narrative written in sequence is checkable against CCTV and other accounts, and a narrative reorganised into categories is not.

Separating observation from inference is the discipline that makes a report credible. 'The male was trying to force the shutter' is an inference; 'the male was pulling at the bottom edge of the shutter with both hands' is an observation, and only the second one survives being challenged.

Securing the CCTV is on the form because it is the step most often missed and the one that cannot be fixed later. Systems overwrite, and a report that notes the incident and does not record that footage was preserved, by whom and where, has lost the best evidence there was.

The data protection note is not boilerplate here. An incident report names people, describes their behaviour and frequently records allegations about them — which makes it exactly the kind of record that must be held securely, shared only with those who need it, and kept only as long as the purpose requires.