Three Jobs, One Officer
It is 02:40 and you are single-crewed. Control sends three jobs in ninety seconds. (1) A nine-year-old boy has walked out of a house after an argument, last seen 45 minutes ago heading towards the canal towpath, in a T-shirt. (2) A 78-year-old man has fallen in his bathroom; his elderly neighbour can hear him groaning through the wall but cannot get in. You know this address - he has called three times in the past month and twice cancelled on arrival. (3) A colleague is single-crewed with a shoplifter who is spitting and refusing to be handcuffed. Control says the only other unit is 25 minutes away and is currently on a Grade 1. You are four minutes from the man, twelve from the canal.
1. What is your order of work, and what principle are you applying?
Read the worked answer
The principle is immediate threat to life that you can actually resolve, not simply the nearest address or the loudest caller.
Go to the 78-year-old first. He is four minutes away, he is groaning and cannot be reached, a fall in a bathroom means a possible head injury or a long lie, and no one else can get there. You can be through the door and hand him to the ambulance inside a few minutes, which is the fastest way to free yourself for the canal.
But the child is the highest overall risk, so the decision only holds if you do two things immediately: task the 25-minute unit to the canal now, and set yourself a hard trigger - if the man is not stabilised and handed over within about ten minutes, you leave and go to the child.
The shoplifter is lowest. A detained suspect in a public order spitting incident is unpleasant and a risk to the colleague, but it is not a life risk, and you must not promise backup you cannot deliver.
The previous false alarms are irrelevant to whether you attend. They inform how you approach - a neighbour describing groaning is new information - but they never justify not going.
2. What exactly do you say to control, and what do you ask for?
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Be specific, give timescales, and make control commit to something.
- 'I am going to the male at the flat, ETA 02:44. I need the 25-minute unit tasked to the missing child at the canal now, and I need to know when they are en route.'
- Ask for the ambulance to be updated with the detail: elderly male, fallen in a locked bathroom, groaning, possible head injury.
- Ask control for the child's description, what he was wearing, his route, whether the towpath has CCTV or a drone available, and whether the water rescue team can be put on notice.
- Get the neighbour's phone number so you can call them while you drive and ask them to keep talking to him through the door.
- Tell the colleague with the spitter to disengage, use the van or leg restraints, and call you if it escalates - be honest that you are not coming.
- Ask control to log the triage decision and the reasons on the incident log.
That log entry is your evidence that you weighed three competing risks on the information available, rather than responding to whichever job shouted loudest.
3. The man is fine and the child is found by the other unit before you arrive. What do you do next, and how do you account for the decision?
Read the worked answer
Update control the moment you know, give your status and location, and say what you are doing next.
- Still attend the child's address. 'Found' is not the same as 'resolved': you need to see the child, speak to the family, understand why he left and consider a safeguarding referral.
- Speak to the neighbour who reported the man, thank them and close the log properly so the next false-alarm call is judged on its merits rather than on a stereotype.
- Write the decision up on the same shift, with times and the information you held at 02:40 - not with the outcome.
- If either job had gone badly, the question would have been whether your reasoning was sound on what you knew, not whether you guessed right. Do not let hindsight rewrite the log, and do not pre-emptively defend yourself in it either; record facts, times and rationale.
- If you genuinely think control's tasking slowed the child's response, raise it with your sergeant as a learning point, not as a complaint about a colleague.