The Missing Laptop and the Seven-Minute Clock
You are the lobby guard in a nine-storey office tower. At 07:05 a tenant reports a laptop taken from a sixth-floor office overnight. You review CCTV: a person in a grey cleaner's jacket leaves by the rear door at 03:12 carrying a black shoulder bag. The DVR clock is documented by maintenance as running six minutes fast. The access log shows a contract cleaner signing in at 02:40 and out at 03:20 under a name the cleaning contractor says is not one of their staff. A day-shift colleague tells you, 'It's probably just the new guy, don't make a big deal of it.' You are asked to write the incident report for police and for the tenant's insurer.
1. Set out the content and structure of your report, including how you handle the time discrepancy and the gaps in what you know.
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Structure
- Report number, author, date and time the report was written, date and time of the incident (these are never assumed to be the same).
- Location - building, floor, room, door number.
- Persons - the complainant with full name and contact, and any witness with their role. Describe the person on video by clothing and build; do not name him as the suspect.
- Narrative in chronological order with times against every step.
- Property - description, serial number if available, estimated value.
- Evidence - camera number, file name, export date, who exported it, chain of custody, and the access-log entry.
- Notifications - who you called, when, and what they said.
- Attachments and a signature block.
The clock State the offset as a fact you verified, and label every time: 'DVR clock verified by maintenance as 6 minutes fast; 03:12 shown is 03:06 actual.' Never silently 'fix' the times - the insurer and the Crown need to see both.
Gaps Say what you did not see: 'No camera coverage of the loading dock; I did not review camera 9.' An honest limitation is worth more than a confident guess.
2. Your colleague tells you not to make a big deal of it. How does that affect what you write?
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It does not change a single fact, but it changes what you must be careful about.
- Write observations, not conclusions. 'A person wearing a grey jacket and carrying a black shoulder bag exited the rear door' - not 'the new cleaner stole the laptop.' Identification was never made, and a report that asserts guilt is both useless to police and dangerous to you.
- Attribute, do not absorb. If your colleague said something relevant, record it as hearsay with the source named: 'Day-shift guard M. Singh stated at 07:30 that...'. Do not launder it into an unattributed statement.
- Do not soften or omit evidence to protect a colleague or an employer. Suppressing the access-log discrepancy would be a false or misleading report - an integrity and licensing issue, not just an internal one.
- Do not editorialize about the colleague's motive either. Report the words, not your theory about why he said them.
- The purpose test: the report is read by a police officer deciding whether to investigate and an adjuster deciding whether to pay. Write for them, not for the shift room.
3. You submit the report, then realize you wrote 02:20 instead of 02:40 for the sign-in time. What do you do, and what must you not do?
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Do
- Prepare a supplementary report immediately, identifying the original report number, the field in error, the correct figure, and how you discovered the error.
- On any paper copy, draw a single line through the error so the original remains legible, write the correction beside it, then initial and date the change.
- Notify your supervisor and, if the report has already gone to police, tell them a corrected version is coming.
Do not
- Use correction fluid, overwrite, tear out the page, or reprint a 'clean' version that looks like it was the original.
- Delete and re-enter without a trace in an electronic system, or backdate a correction.
- Wait until someone asks. Late disclosure of a self-corrected error is far less damaging than an error discovered by someone else.
Why it matters: the time is not a cosmetic detail here - 02:20 versus 02:40 puts the contractor's entry in a different relationship to the CCTV sequence. A visible, dated correction shows your record is reliable; a concealed one destroys the whole document's credibility, and credibility is the only thing a security report has.