Businesses often have to deal with the reality that thefts and other crimes can occur on business premises. Some businesses, such as convenience stores, banks, and retail stores, may be more vulnerable to thieves and criminals than others, yet security guards are employed by a wide range of companies.
We frequently undervalue the value of the ‘security guard‘ who keeps us awake at night while we sleep soundly. In reality, there are various advantages to employing a private security guard, the most obvious of which is their ability to safeguard persons and property.
Security guard and Property
By enhancing visibility, a qualified security guard can defend property and secure your investment. For potential criminals and delinquents, this serves as a natural deterrent. Although it can be tough to justify ever-increasing costs these days, hiring a security guard should be considered a need rather than a luxury. The extra cost is well worth the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your home, and more significantly, your life, is safe from rising crime rates.
Apart from the above-mentioned roles and responsibilities that benefit the users, security guards also have to maintain a log of daily incidents and report them to the concerned people.
Incident Reporting
While performing their duty security guards comes across several incidents and accidents in the course of their duties. These incidents are reported daily to the people who were not present at the actual event witnessed by a security guard.
While writing incident reports may not be their favourite aspect of their guard duty, it is unquestionably necessary. However, it is believed that the security guard post would be ordered out at some point because they will be compelled to file an incident report. When preparing a security report, attention to detail is crucial. This implies there should be no spelling or grammar mistakes, and it should include all the necessary information. An incident report is a written statement that includes the details of what happened. These reports could be read by anybody, including bosses or company owners, legal counsel, police, or fire department employees.
What is a security incident report?
A security incident report is a written account of a security breach. We often relate it with incidents involving humans found in a security guard incident record, such as injuries and accidents. They are, however, also used to describe other bad events like theft and criminal attacks. Incident reports, for example, are used to keep track of data security breaches.
A security guard’s incident report should be written in the following manner-
1. What to Write in a Security Incident report?
A good incident report should include the following questions.
- What happened?
- Where did it happen?
- Why did it happen?
- Who was involved or witnessed the incident?
- When did it happen?
- How did it happen?
2. When to write the report?
Because it’s difficult for a human brain to store everything as memories fade it’s important to write a security incident report while it’s fresh in the mind. For this reason, it’s often the case that an incident report is produced in two stages:
- Preliminary report, written straight after the incident.
- The full report, written over the next few days.
By publishing the preliminary report straight after the incident, you quickly make interested parties aware of the incident. A full report is likely to be more comprehensive than a preliminary report.
You can rapidly make interested parties aware of the preliminary report by releasing it soon after the incident. A full report will almost certainly be more thorough than a preliminary report.
3. Where should the report be written?
Security guards usually write their reports on the spot where the incident occurred.
In the first instance, any storage device, such as an audio or video recording, can be used to record the incident. It’s critical to acquire data while it’s still fresh in people’s minds. It’s acceptable if you have to scribble your findings on a napkin and finish the report later.
The majority of report writers will disseminate their results on paper or in a digital format augmented by media.
4. Who should write the report?
Incident report writing is the responsibility of the security guard. They need to gather all the necessary details regarding the incident from people who witnessed or were involved in the incident.
This may mean talking to people at the scene, CCTV controllers and other related parties. Incidents will often be the result of a chain of events, some of which may not be obvious at first.
5. How should a report be written?
Report writing is a skill developed over time. An efficient security guard may not be an equally good report writer. But a well-written report is easy to follow, objective and truthful. Here are some useful tips for writing a good report.
#1 Order
Write the security incident report in chronological order, detailing events from the beginning to the end.
#2 Facts not Fiction
It’s important that a security guard record facts nit a story. Report writing is far from storytelling. So, record the incident as you find it, don’t apply judgments. Use the same rule when taking witness statements.
#3 No Lies
You should record the incidents honestly and not cook up stories.
6. Why you should write a security incident report?
An incident report allows us to learn from our mistakes and improve the world. We can create an external account that can benefit legal or civil processes by simply putting down the sequence of events. This will be aided by security incident reporting tools.
Writing a report might be intimidating and time-consuming, but it is an extremely beneficial activity. The report you create could help everyone from your boss to the CEO.
Before beginning to write a security report, a security guard should organise the information they’ll need to include and the questions they’ll have to answer. The inquiry should be carried out in such a way that the scenario is easily understood by the audience.
Summing-up
Incident reporting is not one of the favourite tasks on the security guard’s list of duties. A security guard duty comes with a lot of responsibilities and writing an accurate incident report is one of them. An incident report serves as a useful piece of document in a court of law, so it needs to cover everything in detail.
Shergroup has been in the security industry for around 15 years now, we’ve seen, managed and secured a lot of properties with our security services. Security guarding is one of our prime services where we provide professionally trained and experienced security guards services when you need guarding for your site.
We start with risk assessment for your site determining the security needs and preparing or updating your current security plan.
Our operations staff carefully picks the guards who are appropriate for your site based on your directions. Before the deployment of guards on our App, officers receive site-specific training so that they may record all their observations and patrol log details in a database. Our clients can access this database, which contains all the specific information down to individual occurrences and patrol stops. Our client receives information via email every day at their preferred time. We also develop Site Summaries of data using this data to demonstrate that we have followed the site guidelines to a tee (or as close to a tee as we can get).
Call us for a confidential conversation about what you need to upgrade your security operation today. One of our Business Solutions Advisors will be discussing how we can help you upgrade your site.
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