Morbid question I know, but…How do the police know whose door to knock on if something happens to you?

[Hermanfromguesswho]

Inspired by another thread asking what people would assume if police officers knocked on your door and the overwhelming response was to worry that something had happened to a loved one.
Anyone who works in the police…how do you know who is next of kin/emergency contact?
I, for example, am a single parent of teenagers. I live alone with them.
Their Dad lives a couple of hours away. I have parents and siblings, who I am in close contact with but they all live at least 3 hours away and although they know what I do, they don’t know the name of where I work. They know my friends names but don’t have their contact details.
My whole support system here is a couple of very close friends (one is my children’s godparent) and my ex parent in laws (who live locally)
Morbid thought but I worry if I had a serious car accident and was badly injured or killed, how would my children find out? Is there somewhere I can register my friend and in laws as my official emergency contacts as they would be best placed to be with my children, care for them and inform the children’s Dad and my work etc.
I wouldn’t want someone knocking on my Mums door 3 hours away who would be lost and not know how to deal with it all!!

I’ve always wondered this. Once my house was broken into when I was away camping and my phone battery had run out. The police were called by a neighbour and the police were then able to contact my parents, who came to secure the property. Absolutely no idea how the police found contact details of my parents! And it wasn’t even a particularly serious situation really!

No idea why you're coming across so snarky tbh.

Not everyone has an iPhone you know.

I didn't say we weren't aware.
Not everyone has an iPhone!

Yes it's horrific and the worst thing anyone else can imagine doibg, I m so sorry to hear about your son x

I’m surprised the police officer on here doesn’t know the emergency contact is available on any smartphone and you definitely don’t need to unlock it…

That aside, they’ll work off your car insurance details if it’s a car accident. Any other accident I.e bicycle, run over and I’d imagine it’d be ID or bank cards but if you don’t carry those like me, they’d struggle until you came around and could tell them your name, unless of course other officers know about the ICE feature…

you don’t need to unlock a phone to get emergency contact details. If a person has it set up it will say medical Id on the phone click that it brings up the contact information. It’s also the way to ca emergency services without unlocking a phone.

But it can be on Androids too? So you do check for an ICE if they have an iPhone but not if you find an Android?

Yeah they must do. It could be linked to HMRC. Nothing for DVLA as I don't drive. None of my neighbours knew where I worked so not that...but yeah looks like I'll never know! I hadn't done anything wrong btw. They thought I was a witness to something.

So you wouldn’t access the emergency contact information on an iPhone that’s available without you having unlock it?

Mine has NHS numbers, allergies, health conditions/medications, blood types and who to contact and inform.

I don’t mean to sound rude, I’m just surprised as it can provide what I would assume is really useful information in an emergency.

ICE In Case of Emergency on your phone, you can identify a number of telephone numbers and contact details and the emergency services or anyone can access this without unlocking your phone.

When DH’s ex died in her home. The police came to our house a few hours after they found her. We think they found some information on their DS and traced him back to our address. Their concern was that he was not going to go to his mother’s home and was safe and looked after with us. He was 16 at the time.

I live in a small rural village. When my next door neighbour, who lived alone, died of a heart attack when walkng with friends, the police came to my door. I had her door key, as she had mine, and was able to go next door with the officer to look through her address book and find the number of her daughter, who I knew well. I broke the news to her as gently as I could. I think the police officers were gratefull that I was able to break the news, rather than them having to. It was a great shock to me, though.
Previously, when the same lady's son was killed in an accident, the police asked me to accompany them while they told her the awful news.

On my phone, if you press 'emergency call', you can access my ICE details. It's rather depressing that we're all dutifully filling in in the details but the police/ emergency services don't know how to use them! Get with the program! How on earth are you going to cope with all that AI that's coming.

Police/emergency services ought to know this. It's a simple way to access id, medical info & nok. It's available on iphone & android. Obvs, everyone doesn't have a smartphone but many, many people do. Time saver.

Thanks for this thread. I did not know this so have put all my details and medications in my medical info. Including my allergies.

I don't get this argument. Swiping a lock screen and calling the ICE contact there takes, at most, seconds. If they don't answer or say 'Sorry X and I broke up 2 years ago,' you've lost barely any time and can go on to try something else. And tbh how many people keep their phones for years and years? Most people replace them fairly often, so there wouldn't be an opportunity for the data to be years out of date.

Compared to checking things like electoral rolls, credit cards, which can take hours/days/weeks - the police don't have access to any of these directly and all involve liaising with other agencies, who have their own workload and don't automatically drop everything to respond to a police request - if it's even in working hours. For voter registration, for example, if an accident happened on Friday night chances are there wouldn't be anyone to get hold of in the council until Monday morning at the earliest.

Given you were actually an officer, albeit "a few decades" ago, it's weird you seem to assume that the police have unlimited access to every other organisation's database. They don't!

I once had to find a way to get a woman with a very dangerous and unexpected blood test result to my hospital ASAP but when we called her GP the woman had just left for a holiday & GP didn’t know where. Next of kin were not contactable on numbers given. GP and I agreed it was a police job, and the local police went door to door on her street and found a neighbour who knew where she’d gone. National police, airline and then Interpol got rapidly involved and she was flown straight back home when her plane touched down overseas. Happy to say the outcome was good after treatment. Just to illustrate what the police might do if needed.

You think that one person responding to a thread on Mumsnet is a spokesperson for all the emergency services? Now that's depressing.

I was responding to the message I quoted, not the use of ICE contacts.

When I was an officer we had the electoral roll and DVLA databases available 24/7 for instant access - I could do it myself or ask our radio operators to check. We had contacts with big credit card companies and banks who would pass on info fairly quickly in some circumstances, though not instantly and they weren’t the first port of call. Insurance companies and others were more hit or miss though most were very helpful albeit slow. Some of that may well have changed, especially as privacy laws have tightened.

I’m also surprised police today don’t use ICE contacts, though. It wasn’t really around when I was an officer (most people didn’t have any sort of mobile, let alone a smart phone) but it seems fairly obvious. We might have gone through someone’s mobile if they had one and looked for a contact named “Mum” or the like, and through their wallet - this seems similar. Edited to add: Thinking about this though, I don’t think we’d have used a phone number for a death notification unless there was little alternative. We always tried to do these in person.

Yea, I have my son as my ICE contact. >solo mum<

Anyway, we have ID cards here, size of a credit card. Know immediately if involved in a scary situation Amsterdam hostage taking in Apple Store, it's on Netflix

I can travel all of Europe with it too. Utterly fabulous.

(Passport kept for US, Asia, Africa, etc.).

No, I don't. I was expressing surprise that the particular poster was unaware of the procedure for retrieving emergency info from a smartphone.

For everyone advising the ICE contact. I had a car accident a few years ago where my car flipped over and landed upside down. I was fine and didn’t loose consciousness. My phone was absolutely smashed to pieces, there was no way you could have read anything from the screen

Same here: an ICE on the phone is useful, but only if the phone can be found in working order. When this happened to me, the police reached my purse first, which has my name and all my medical info in. But apparently they identified my from the bank card they found first. If I hadn't had such an unusual name, though, they'd have probably dug around further.

Well, yes, they'd go through the registration number instead then. But phones are carried by the majority of people including those who don't drive (and for those worried 'but I don't have a car' or 'what if I'm not in the car?') it may be fairly reassuring that there are multiple ways to identify an injured person when they are unable to communicate - vehicles, work passes, travelcards, bank cards, phones, uniforms (that's how they knew who to contact when my brother was killed as his work pass was missed in the dark - they got in touch with his employer who could see he hadn't clocked in).

I used to be a childminder at home and I put a notice up in my hall about the children who might be in my home, ages and descriptions, which days they were normally present, parents' contact details etc. A fellow childminder had had an unfortunate accident at her home and the local Social services asked us to do this so that if an emergency happened, responders would know what to do with all the babies