The Problems With Police Crash Reports

(Source: Unsplash/Aaron Doucett.)

Every hour, a traffic collision occurs and police officers are called to the forefront of the scene. They can be met with tragedy: the death of a person driving, walking, or biking. Amid other responsibilities, part of their duty during this stressful moment is to provide a written crash report of the incident. 

Our streets are dangerous, killing about 40,000 people a year. To try and bring this shocking number down, transportation agencies look to police crash reports to help determine crash causes and the most dangerous streets in need of a redesign. The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) says that “[c]rashes are currently viewed as the most objective and reliable measurements of road safety.” But there is an overbearing issue with this system of reliance on police reports to determine the cause of the crash: Police reports are not always accurate, and they’re not sufficient for what transportation agencies want to use them for. 

Transportation engineers have long relied on the rote implementation of design standards as a measurement of street safety. However, more and more transportation agencies are incorporating the use of police crash reports to determine empirically if a road is safe.

“Presently, transportation professionals use safety data (such as crash data, road characteristics, and traffic volume) to evaluate road safety performance and inform their decisions,” USDOT writes on road safety fundamentals.

Over time, a buildup of inaccuracies within crash reports becomes troublesome when traffic agencies use police reports as a data source. 

As an example, according to USDOT, a typical analysis “includes estimating the expected number of crashes and comparing it against the road’s actual safety performance.” This sort of analysis could inform departments of transportation in high-risk locations, and help steer time and energy to those spaces for redesign or other safety measures. 

If a key detail such as the crash location is incorrect, it can easily skew the data analysis of which streets are dangerous streets, and therefore which streets need updated safety measures. This will, in turn, continue to put people at risk. When other report inaccuracies compile onto this factor, it is questionable if transportation agencies should fully rely on police reports as accurate and relevant crash data. 

USDOT says that it’s a complex process to understand what caused a crash and determine how to implement design changes, and that “both accurate data and high quality data analysis is necessary for road safety management.” 

The frequency of inaccuracies in police reports reflects the conditions under which they are written. Officers on the scene are often under pressure to write the quickest, most condensed notes they can. They also have other responsibilities at the scene of a crash, such as ensuring everyone is safe, and managing the logistics of automobile removal and traffic movement. Moreover, police forces are frequently overwhelmed, so it’s no surprise that key details are sometimes left out or transcribed incorrectly. 

“It’s not the discrepancies that are the problem,” says Strong Towns President Charles Marohn. “It’s that we cite police reports for crash data, and the police reports aren’t adequate for what the federal highway administration or departments of transportation want to use them for.” 

While the initial reaction to this issue may be to better train officers, or update how crash reports are conducted, Marohn says, “We don’t necessarily need to change police reports or figure out how to make them better. Police reports are needed because they account for the law.”  

The deeper issue is that by “just looking at what laws were broken or not broken is not going to provide an accurate analysis on what caused the crash,” said Marohn.

At a crosswalk along Ager Road in Hyattsville, Maryland, a motorist struck Hellen Jorgensen. She was transported to a hospital after the crash, and died shortly after. When it was determined that Jorgensen was highly intoxicated at the time of the crash, and didn’t activate the rectangular rapid flashing beacons, law enforcement concluded the driver could not be held responsible. Contributing street design factors were never considered.

In a Crash Analysis Studio organized by Strong Towns to discuss the underlying factors that led to Jorgensen’s death, Hyattsville community members pointed out design problems with the street that contributed to the crash, such as the crosswalk button being nearly out of sight for people walking.

Prior to the session, the police crash reports were examined by panelists and community volunteers who discovered multiple discrepancies between the county police report and the city police report.

• The county report held specific discrepancies of the location. It stated the crash occurred on Ager Road, showing GPS coordinates south of the Lancer Drive intersection by 470 feet, but also said the crash was 540 ft north of Lancer Drive along Ager Road. 

• The city report indicated the crash occurred at “5600 Blk Ager Rd Sb,” indicating the driver was traveling south. The county diagram illustrated southbound travel as well, but the written portion of the county report indicated northbound travel. 

• The team also discovered the listed speed limit was incorrect. The county crash report indicated a 35-mph speed limit. But when community members went to document the condition of the crosswalk on Ager Road, they recorded the actual posted speed limit to be 30 mph. 

• The county report also fails to clearly articulate who was driving at the time of the crash; at one point citing the “female” owner of the vehicle was driving and later citing that a male was driving. 

Panelists discussed by email how to go about analyzing the crash when there were so many discrepancies within the report. One participant, Danny Schaible, suggested that some of the discrepancies were the result of typos, but that they were “worth considering,” nonetheless.

"I am honestly not sure we can conclude the driver was going north, given that the city and county crash reports indicate that the driver was traveling northbound and southbound in different sections of the report,” session panelist Melissa Schweisguth added to the conversation.

When Delays in the Release of Crash Reports Stall Safety Improvements

Another challenge in using police reports to inform street safety upgrades is delay: a police report can take months to become accessible to the public or private entities. These are months in which people have to continue to use a dangerous street where a crash has occurred.

In Florida, state statutes indicate that crash reports are confidential for 60 days after being submitted to the department. In most places, if the case is still under investigation, transportation agencies won’t be able to access it for crash data for, potentially, months or even years.

Mahrokh Khan was walking along a crosswalk in Richmond, Virginia, when she was struck by a vehicle. Khan was pronounced dead not long after being taken to a medical center. This crash, which occurred on January 27, 2023, was still under investigation for nearly two months when a volunteer affiliated with the Crash Analysis Studio issued a police report request. At the time this article was written, nearly four months after the crash, the report was still unavailable for crash data. 

Delayed police reports can greatly slow down transportation agencies' process of determining streets that are dangerous, and even more years can pass as departments of transportation work to implement new street designs. 

Even if a transportation agency can acquire a police crash report in a reasonable amount of time, there is another problem in that what’s required on a police report is not uniform throughout different jurisdictions. Additionally, in some places, only crashes that result in an injury or a certain damage level are required to be reported. So, not every crash or collision is reported and compiled into a transportation agency's data analysis.

This means the data would give an illusion that streets are safer than they actually are, thus removing a level of urgency for redesigning dangerous streets. For example, suppose a jurisdiction requires crash reports to only be submitted when the damage incurred is over $1,000. Then the law is changed to require only crashes incurring over $4,000 of damage need to be reported. “You would expect to see fewer reported crashes after the change, since crashes with damage below $4,000 would no longer be reported, even though there may be no real change in the number of crashes occurring,” writes USDOT on the complexities with crash data.

Factual discrepancies, delayed data collection, and different standards for constructing a report all play into the difficulty of using crash reports for safety analysis. But the most fundamental problem remains a mismatch in how law enforcement defines safety and how transportation professionals define it. Police officers are not focused on making the street safer through design, but on assigning legal liability. Their analysis of a crash inherently focuses on behavioral explanations and does not regularly detail built-environment factors that put people at risk.

If you'd like to join the next Crash Analysis Studio session (May 25) or nominate a crash for consideration in a future session, visit this page.

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