Capturing evidence properly

Fifteen minutes today is worth more than three hours in six weeks. Most accounts of incidents fail not because nothing happened, but because the record was made from memory, weeks later, mixing what was seen with what was assumed.

You need nobody’s permission to write anything down, and making a note commits you to nothing. You can decide next week whether to do anything with it.

Before any of this. Get out of the situation first. Nothing on this page is worth an injury, and filming a confrontation frequently prolongs it. If recording makes it worse, stop recording.

The nine steps, in order

Work down them. Each one exists because leaving it out is what makes a record unusable later.

1. Get away from it, then write. Distance first, paper second. A note written forty metres away and four minutes later is a contemporaneous record. A note taken during an argument is a reason to stay in the argument.
2. Fix the time before anything else. Date, the time it started, how long it lasted. This is the field people guess at afterwards, and guessing is what gets a record picked apart.
3. Write the words, not the meaning. Exact words in quotation marks where you are sure. “Words to the effect of” where you are not. Write that you are unsure next to anything you are unsure of, because a record admitting doubt is treated as more credible, not less.
4. Write the place precisely. Street and number, which end of the platform, which side of the room, what you were standing next to.
5. Who, by name or by description. Name if you know it. Otherwise build, clothing, accent, anything they said about themselves, and who was with them.
6. Witnesses, with a way to reach them. Ask on the spot, before people disperse. A witness who can be found is worth more than one who cannot, and by tomorrow they have gone.
7. Then, under a separate heading, what you think it meant. Why you believe it was hostile, what context made it so, what you were afraid of. Keeping this apart from step three is what makes the whole record usable.
8. Who you told, and when. Names and times.
9. Sign it, and record when you wrote it. Your name, the date, and the clock time you made the note. That last figure is what makes it contemporaneous.

What step seven buys. “He was obviously threatening me” is an opinion. “He stood about half a metre in front of me, blocking the pavement, and said the following” lets somebody else reach the conclusion on their own.

The short form, for a phone in the street

Six words. This is the version you will use, so learn this one.

Time. Place. Words. Who. Who saw. When written.

Everything in the nine steps hangs off one of those six. Fill them in standing up, then do the long version at home the same evening.

If it happens on Shabbat or a festival

The advice to write it down at once collides with the day on which a great many incidents at Jewish buildings actually happen. Three ways through it, and none of them costs you the record.

Ask somebody who can write. A non-observant friend, a neighbour, a passer-by who stopped, the police officer who attended. Give them the six words and ask them to note the time now.

Anchor the time to the service. During the Torah reading. Before the Amidah. As people were coming out of kiddush. Those anchors are recoverable to within a few minutes afterwards, because the building’s own timings fix them, and the wardens will confirm them.

Then write it the moment the day goes out, and say so in the note. Something like: written at 9.40pm on Saturday 14 March, as soon as Shabbat ended; the incident was at approximately 11.15am. Recording the delay and the reason protects the weight of the note. Concealing the delay is what costs you.

And ask the security volunteers on the door the same evening. They were watching the street when nobody else was, and in many communities they keep their own log.

Photographs, video and screenshots

Keep the original file. It carries the date, the time and often the location in its embedded data. A screenshot of it does not, and a screenshot of a screenshot is close to worthless. Copy it somewhere safe and do not crop, edit or filter it.

For anything online, capture more than the words. You want the full post with the account name and handle, the date and time it was posted, and the web address. Capture the whole screen rather than a tight crop, because a crop cannot be verified. Save the link separately as text, since posts get deleted, and a link plus a dated capture is stronger than either alone.

Think about everybody else in the frame. Participants who did not want to be identified are in your footage too. Do not publish images of identifiable people without asking, even where the image supports your account.

Say it was antisemitic, or it will not be counted

This is the step almost everybody misses, and it is the one that changes what the record is for.

Report a smashed window without saying why you think it happened, and it is logged as criminal damage. Report shouting in the street as a public order matter, and that is what it stays. Neither will ever appear in any figure about antisemitism, and no phone call afterwards reliably changes the classification.

So say the sentence explicitly, at the time you report it.

“I am reporting this as an antisemitic incident, and this is why I believe that.”

Then the reason: what was said, what was worn, what building it was outside, and what date in the Jewish calendar it was.

The annual figures your community argues from are assembled out of reports that individual people made. An incident nobody reports is not a smaller incident. It is an absent one.

Where to send it

This site does not take reports. It is not a reporting service, we cannot act on anything, and sending it here achieves nothing.

Send it to two places, not one. The police, and whoever compiles antisemitic incident figures where you live. Reporting to one does not prevent the other, and where a university, an employer, a regulator or a platform is involved, those run alongside rather than instead.

Ask for a reference number and write it down. Following anything up without one costs hours you will not get back. What that number is for, who classifies your report and what to do when the classification is wrong are in after you report it.

Storing it

Somewhere that is not only your phone, and not your work laptop. One copy on the phone and one elsewhere is enough.

Keep a short index if there is more than one incident: date, one line, where the files are. Anything formal will eventually ask you for a chronology.

Do not circulate it in group chats. Once an account is in a chat of forty people you have lost control of it, other people’s recollections start merging into yours, and the record stops being independent.

If you were the target

Report it if you want to, and do not if you do not. That decision is genuinely yours and there is no obligation attached to it.

Make the note anyway, today, even undecided. What you cannot do next week is write down what was said while you still remember it exactly.

If something is continuing rather than finished, when it comes at you is the page for that.

Say the six back, then do one thing

Fill in the blanks124 words

From memory, no scrolling: what are the six words of the short form? If one is missing it is usually the last, and the last is the one that makes the rest count.

If something happens to me today, then I will walk away from it first and write the six words standing up, before I ring anybody.

If it happens on Shabbat or a festival, then I will fix the time to the service, ask a warden to confirm it, and write it up the moment the day ends.

If I ring to report it, then I will say the words “I am reporting this as an antisemitic incident” out loud, and I will ask for the reference number before I hang up.