5.3 Verb Tense and Irregular Forms

Why Verb Tense and Form Matter in Report Writing

Police incident reports are almost always written in the simple past tense, because a report documents events that have already happened by the time the report is written: 'the officer arrived,' 'the suspect fled,' 'the witness described.' Two related but distinct problems show up in report-writing grammar items: using the wrong tense for the situation (mixing past and present within a description of the same past event), and using the wrong form of a verb, especially an irregular verb whose past tense and past participle do not follow the standard '-ed' pattern.

Simple Past vs. Past Participle

Every verb has, at minimum, three core forms relevant to report writing: the base form (write), the simple past (wrote), and the past participle (written). The simple past stands alone as the main verb of a sentence describing a completed action: 'The officer wrote the report before end of shift.' The past participle never stands alone - it always needs a helping verb such as had, has, have, was, or were to form a complete verb phrase: 'The officer had written the report before end of shift' or 'The report was written by the officer.' A frequent report-writing error is using the past participle where the simple past is needed, or vice versa: 'The officer written the report' is incorrect, because the past participle 'written' has no helping verb, and 'The officer has wrote the report' is also incorrect, because the simple past 'wrote' is used after a helping verb, where the past participle 'written' belongs.

High-Yield Irregular Verbs for Report Writing

Regular verbs simply add '-ed' to form both the simple past and the past participle (walk/walked/walked), so they rarely generate confusion. Irregular verbs change form in ways that must be memorized, and a specific set of them appears constantly in policing and incident-report language:

Notice that a few of these irregular verbs, like 'run' (ran/run) and 'go' (went/gone), do not fit a single clean pattern - some have a past participle that looks identical to the base form, others change completely between simple past and past participle. That inconsistency is exactly why this list needs direct memorization rather than a shortcut rule, and why test writers favor these specific verbs when building distractor sentences: they are common enough to appear naturally in a report, and irregular enough to trip up a fast reader.

Two Frequent Error Patterns

Report-writing grammar items tend to build irregular-verb errors around two specific mistakes:

1. Past participle used without a helping verb, standing in for the simple past. 'The witness seen the collision from her porch' is incorrect - 'seen' cannot stand alone as a main verb. The correct simple-past form is 'The witness saw the collision from her porch.'
2. Simple past used after a helping verb, standing in for the past participle. 'The suspect had ran from the scene before units arrived' is incorrect - after the helping verb 'had,' the past participle 'run' is required, not the simple past 'ran.' The correct sentence is 'The suspect had run from the scene before units arrived.'

Staying in One Tense Within a Sentence

A separate but related issue is tense consistency: when a single sentence describes a sequence of actions that all happened in the past, every verb describing that sequence should generally stay in past tense, unless a helping verb like 'had' is deliberately used to show that one action happened before another (the past perfect tense). 'The officer arrives on scene and speaks with the victim' incorrectly shifts to present tense for events that are clearly being reported after the fact; the correct version is 'The officer arrived on scene and spoke with the victim.' Where the past perfect becomes genuinely useful is sequencing two past events relative to each other: 'The suspect had fled before officers arrived' makes clear that the fleeing happened first, ahead of the officers' arrival - both actions are in the past, but 'had fled' signals which one came earlier.

On the exam, when you see a sentence with two or more verbs, check that they all sit in a tense that is logically consistent with a report being written after the events occurred, and that any past-participle form used with a helping verb is the correct irregular form rather than the simple past standing in for it. This same two-step check - tense consistency first, then correct irregular form second - resolves nearly every verb-based distractor you will encounter in this section of the exam.