Well-Written Incident Reports are an Essential Element of Effective Public-Private Partnerships
There has been an increased emphasis during the past few years on the need for effective partnerships between private security and public law enforcement. As the demands on law enforcement increase alongside recruiting challenges and decreasing budgets, more duties and responsibilities for safety and security will fall on the shoulders of private security.
Many of these additional duties and responsibilities will involve tasks that public law enforcement traditionally handled but can no longer accomplish due to the increasing demand for their services combined with the reduced supply of new officers. What this means for private security is it must be better at all segments of its job. One of the core tasks of this requirement for private security personnel at all levels is to be proficient at writing complete and factual case incident reports (CIRs).
In the past, private security personnel were hardly ever required to write CIRs. Instead, they depended on a sheet of checklists to account for their shift activities. At most, there was a notes section on that checklist where officers could write relevant information about a particular matter.
If law enforcement was called about an incident, the very best they could expect from the security guard was a witness statement. Even as private security has transitioned from written checklists on paper to electronic checklists on a computer or smartphone, very few private security officers are required to actually write CIRs. That’s a real problem for clients and law enforcement. The ability of security officers to write clear, accurate, and complete CIRs is a core part of their job and essential for credibility.
At my company, we screen applicants for their writing ability. Officers must possess basic grammar and spelling skills, or they will never succeed. We also spend a great deal of time training officers to take field notes, write effective CIRs, and properly testify in court. It’s also our protocol to send any CIRs with a criminal nexus to the relevant law enforcement agency.
“When our deputies are tipped to a location that has private security, it is usually because an event has occurred involving criminal activity,” says Polk County, Iowa, Sheriff Kevin Schneider. “Our deputies rely on the testimony and written reports from the private security officers on the scene to provide us with an accurate and detailed record of what has occurred. The witness statements from private security officers, backed by their CIRs, are many times essential in our ability to effectively prosecute criminals. Witness statements alone are just not enough.”
Ensuring contract security officers write thorough incident reports is essential for Tenille Borstad, the vice president and regional director of physical security at U.S. BANCORP.
“Creating a standard or best practice as it relates to incident documentation is vital to ensure necessary and factual information is captured,” she says. “In addition, it is important that training and quality assurance are an ongoing process as these reports are considered legal documents.
“As the security industry continues to grow and technology evolves, the fundamentals of report writing remain a critical component to any incident, investigation, communication, or actions taken to mitigate response,” she continues.
As the security industry continues to grow and technology evolves, the fundamentals of report writing remain a critical component of any incident.
Receiving timely and accurate incident reports from the private security officers in his area when an event occurs is important to Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn from the Wood County Sheriff's Office in Ohio.
“Receiving well-written, complete, and timely incident reports from our private security partners is an essential piece of any case. While verbal witness statements can be helpful, they simply do not provide the detail we and our investigators need to provide them with the fullest picture of a particular case,” Wasylyshyn explains. “The more details of an incident we can get, the better. The security officer who writes an incident report should include all details because no one knows at the outset of a case which specific details may or may not be critical to a case later on. If we have all the details as a part of a security officer’s CIR, the investigator will be able to do the best job possible because of having all the information that is possible to obtain.”
The need for private security officers to be able to write effective reports is also critical if they or their clients are faced with a lawsuit. If something is not written down, then—in the eyes of the courts—it most likely did not occur. Additionally, few people can accurately recall what occurred yesterday or years after an incident.
No one likes writing reports. Doing so well requires a degree of commitment, skill, and attention to detail. However, the ability and discipline of private security officers to write quality CIRs is an essential part of being a professional security officer, as opposed to the old and tired guard industry of yesteryear.
A profession connotes that the composition of that profession is comprised of professionals. Building and maintaining strong and meaningful public/private partnerships as a private security professional is important today and will become increasingly important in the future as the world faces an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Tom M. Conley, CPP, is president and CEO of The Conley Group, Inc. He formerly served as a police captain and retired as a senior-level commissioned officer from the U.S. Navy Police after nearly 30 years of combined active and reserve service. Conley is also a certified Navy Master Training Specialist and a certified counter-terrorism instructor by the U.S. Department of Defense. He has served on the ASIS Law Enforcement Liaison Community for the past 37 years.