Three Men, One Bolan, Two Accounts
You are the duty officer at a checkpoint on a ring road. At 18:20 on 6 August you stop a white Suzuki Bolan and later write this in your diary: white Bolan; registration read as KP-8341 with the second digit partly obscured by mud; three occupants; driver about 35, full black beard, blue shalwar kameez, no cap; front passenger about 25, clean-shaven, grey baseball cap, white shirt; a third man in the rear seat mostly out of view, wearing a dark brown chadar; a black plastic bag tied to the roof rack; left headlight cracked; a child's yellow school bag on the rear parcel shelf; vehicle left towards the north at 18:26. At 19:05 a constable at another post sends you a message: 'That Bolan - white HiAce van, four men, driver in white clothes with beard, front man in cap, plate KP-8341, they went south.' Your diary and his message are the only two records that exist.
1. Task 1. List every point on which the constable's message differs from your diary, and for each say whether your diary entry actually supports your version, or whether it is itself an inference.
Read the worked answer
Points of difference:
- Vehicle type - Suzuki Bolan (yours) vs HiAce van (his). These are different classes of vehicle, not a detail.
- Number of occupants - three vs four.
- Driver's clothing - blue shalwar kameez vs white.
- Direction of departure - north vs south.
Partly consistent: the plate KP-8341, and a front passenger in a cap.
What your own entry really supports:
- The entry supports only what you wrote between 18:20 and 18:26, and only what you saw.
- 'Three occupants' is not an observation - your own note says the rear occupant was 'mostly out of view'. A person in the footwell or behind the seat would not have been counted. The defensible entry is 'three persons seen; rear seat not fully visible'.
- 'KP-8341' is a probable reading, not a fact, because you recorded that one digit was obscured.
Separate observation from inference in the file before either record is used again; the constable may simply have repeated a description he was given.
2. Task 2. The registration number is about to go into a district broadcast. What do you do about it, and why?
Read the worked answer
Do not broadcast KP-8341 as a firm number. An unqualified plate number sends patrols to stop innocent vehicles and, worse, tells a real suspect that the police have the wrong number.
Action:
- Record it as 'KP-?341 - second digit partly obscured by mud; read as 8; not confirmed' and keep the caveat on the same line as the number, not in a note below it.
- Send the broadcast with the vehicle body type, the cracked left headlight, the roof-rack bag and the yellow school bag as primary identifiers; the plate as secondary.
- Ask the excise and registration office for all white Bolans in the district matching the pattern KP-?341 - a list of five or six vehicles can be checked in an hour.
- Check toll, fuel-station and safe-city camera records for the ring road between 18:20 and 19:30.
Never rewrite the diary entry afterwards. If you later read the plate properly, add a new, dated entry that says so and why. A corrected page with no history is worse evidence than a doubtful one with history.
3. Task 3. Which single item in your diary is most useful for a later identification, and which is least useful? Justify both, and state how each should be recorded.
Read the worked answer
Most useful: the yellow school bag on the rear parcel shelf.
Reasons: a plate can be swapped in ten minutes and a vehicle repainted in a day, but an interior item is specific, unusual, and unlikely to be noticed and removed by someone who does not know it has been recorded. It also sits where a court can be told exactly where it was. It is second only to the occupants themselves.
Least useful: the cracked left headlight. Cracked lights are common on that road, are rarely noticed by the person who owns them, and cannot distinguish one white Bolan from another.
Recording rules for both:
- Write position, colour, material and distinguishing marks, not a bare noun. 'Yellow school bag, child-size, on rear parcel shelf, right side, black strap' survives cross-examination; 'school bag' does not.
- The dark brown chadar on the rear occupant is the next strongest item, but only because you recorded a colour and a position.
- Record the time of each observation separately from the time of writing it down; a court will ask which came first.