But don’t the police investigate crashes?
The Takeaway
The police are only tasked with “investigating” crashes if someone was injured or if a vehicle was damaged enough to require towing from the scene. Those “investigations” are really only a practice in recording basic observations on a checklist-type form we call a police report. These reports provide useful information about the time, date, location, and vehicles involved in the crash but they are not investigations.
Only the most serious and severe crashes, those involving life threatening or fatal injuries, are truly investigated by the police. These investigations are typically performed by a specialized crash team and involve the marking of evidence and collection of photographs, measurements, and electronic data. These investigations make up an estimated 1% of all reportable crashes the police respond to.
The other 99% of reportable crashes, and 100% of non-reportable crashes, are usually not investigated at all. These crashes usually suffer from the loss of valuable roadway and vehicle evidence as time passes from when the crash occurred to when a dispute is raised. Once the conclusive evidence is gone, reconstructions become limited to evaluating hypotheticals and witness statements.
What’s the point of hiring an investigator to preserve evidence of a crash or hiring an accident reconstructionist to analyze that evidence? Isn’t that what the police do?
If you’ve ever been involved in a crash, chances are that your first call was to the local police department or 911. The police were probably the first to arrive on the scene, a police officer took your statement, and a police officer prepared an accident report.
Would you call that an investigation? Do you remember the officer taking any pictures? How about measurements? Did they inspect the roadway for markings or ask to recover electronic data from anyone’s car? I’m willing to bet the answer is a resounding “no.” And for good reason - the police don’t have the time, resources, or even the responsibility to do much more than respond to the crash and complete a checklist that we usually refer to as a police report.
Police Reports vs Investigations
The work that police do in responding to crashes, clearing the road, and documenting basic information (like the time, date, weather, and parties involved) is a valuable service to the community, but, in nearly all crashes, it’s not an investigation. Instead, the end result is a report of plain observations made by the officer on scene. I’d argue that, to rise to the level of an investigation, there must be more than a surface-level recording of what’s plainly visible on scene. Frankly, most crashes don’t warrant the level of time and resources required for a proper investigation and they may not even rise to the level of requiring a police response.
I like to categorize the police response to crashes in three levels:
Level I - A fender bender with no suspected injuries and limited damage that doesn’t require a tow truck. The police may be called but this is a “non-reportable” crash for them (more on this soon). Someone may get a traffic ticket.
Level II - A crash with some injuries or suspected injuries and/or at least one vehicle is disabled and needs to be towed. Pennsylvania law requires the police to be called and a report to be completed. This is a “reportable” crash. Someone may get a traffic ticket.
Level III - A crash with severe, or even fatal, injuries and one or more disabled vehicles. These are still “reportable” crashes and may result in traffic tickets but also may result in serious criminal charges. This is when a proper investigation is warranted by the police.
Notice how the penalties for Level I and II crashes are limited to traffic tickets? In Pennsylvania, most traffic offenses are handled by our lowest level courts - Magisterial District Courts. These courts don’t afford you a jury trial or the right to court-appointed legal representation. Instead, a judge will rule on your case from the bench and the only evidence likely to be presented is a statement from a police officer and anything you’ve prepared for yourself. The stakes are relatively low - a fine and/or points on your driver’s license - and it would be complete overkill for the police to involve a forensic unit or qualified crash investigators. It’s not until you reach Level III that the stakes get high, the penalties severe, and a proper investigation and reconstruction becomes necessary to support serious criminal charges.
What are the police required to do?
Here in Pennsylvania, the law requires drivers to immediately report a crash to the police if a person was injured or killed in the crash or if a vehicle is damaged enough that it can’t be driven from the scene (§ 3746). Crashes that meet one of those two conditions are typically referred to as “reportable” crashes (Levels II and III above). Once they’ve been notified of a reportable crash, Pennsylvania law demands the police “investigate” the crash, prepare a report, and submit that report to the Pennsylvania department of transportation for the primary purpose of developing crash prevention and reduction programs. (§ 3746, § 3751, PUB 153). The stated purpose is key here so I’ll repeat it - developing crash prevention and reduction programs. In other words, they’re collecting information for statistics studying crashes in the commonwealth. That’s the official reason for police involvement in a crash.
What is this police “investigation” supposed to entail? Here’s what the law says, in part:
(a) Form and content.-- …The written report forms shall call for sufficiently detailed information to disclose with reference to a vehicle accident the cause, conditions then existing and the persons and vehicles involved…
So the required “investigation” is really just a form that the police must fill out and submit to the DOT as a report of the crash. You can see a sample of the form here. The form is a quick and convenient way for the officers to ensure that they capture all of the information asked of them. A scroll through the form reveals the extent of the “investigation” as little more than the basic conditions at the time of the incident and the people and vehicles involved. Things like the location, time, date, weather, road conditions, people involved, and make/model of the vehicles involved make up a large portion of the form while additional areas are reserved for reporting what part of each vehicle was damaged, if any safety restraints (e.g. airbags and seat belts) were used or deployed, and what the officer’s assessment of the injuries were. Towards the end of the form, a page is reserved for a diagram of the crash scene and for the officer to write their narrative describing what they observed along with statements from the drivers and any witnesses.
By the nature of forms, that last page tends to be the most interesting part of the police report as its the only place where the officer is free to actually describe their observations with any detail. Unfortunately, those narratives are frequently no more than a summary of what’s already reported elsewhere on the form and, sometimes, even contradict other parts of the form - leaving the reader unsure of which part of the form to believe. That leaves the driver and witness statements as some of the most insightful parts of the “investigation.” Make no mistake, these police reports are important and quite useful to the investigation of a crash - but they are not themselves an investigation. They are surface-level observations intended to support a collection of crash statistics. That’s what the police are tasked with and that’s what they do for what I call Level II crashes. Level I crashes may get a police response but they’re under no obligation to even prepare a report.
So, Do police ever perform real crash investigations?
Yes! They absolutely do. It’s just a matter of when and why. Here’s the quick and dirty answer: police perform real, in-depth, investigations for only the most serious crashes (Level III) for the purpose of collecting and preserving evidence in support of criminal charges. Why? Police is synonymous with Law Enforcement - their job is to enforce the law and their serious investigations are done for that purpose - Law Enforcement. In my experience, this means that police investigations are only likely if the crash was life threatening or fatal and it’s suspected that serious criminal charges may be warranted. For these types of crashes, a specialized team of officers, with training in accident reconstruction, is usually called in to mark the evidence on scene, take photographs and measurements, download electronic data from the vehicles, and - for particularly well funded departments - maybe even laser scan the scene. Those officers will perform their investigation with the expectation that they will one day have to sit on the witness stand in court and testify to the accuracy and reliability of their work and their findings.
These investigations are followed by analyses of the evidence, a reconstruction of the crash, and long and detailed reports discussing the work that went into the investigation, the methods used, and the conclusions drawn. Fatal crash reports are written more like essays than forms and are supported by documentation and evidence gathered by trained and qualified investigators. These reports should still be subject to scrutiny and cannot be accepted at face value, but they indicate that a full workup of the crash was performed. Seeing an indication that a fatal crash report was, or will be completed, should prompt attorneys and outside investigators to request the full set of photographs, measurements, and scale-diagrams that undoubtedly accompany the report. If the scene was fully and properly documented, the evidence collected by the police can be used by a competent accident reconstructionist to independently analyze and reconstruct the crash to draw their own conclusions. That’s what I would call a proper investigation!
To the point
Many people understand the importance of a police report following a crash. Your insurance company will almost certainly want to see the police report when you make a claim, and you may find that the police report is the only independent documentation concerning what happened. But it’s important to understand that the officer most likely didn’t witness the crash, wasn’t trained to investigate or analyze car crashes, and didn’t really investigate anything. They filled out a form as required by procedure and law and likely forgot all about the crash soon after leaving the scene. Why? Because they're not responsible for any more than that for all but the most severe (Level III) crashes.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, in 2023, there were 1,132 fatal crashes, 48,346 crashes with injuries, and 60,904 “property damage only” or PDO crashes (crashes with no injuries but that did require a vehicle to be towed). You’ll notice that all of these reported numbers are for “reportable” crashes and do not include any crash that didn’t involve injuries or tow trucks. With that in mind, only just over 1% of the reportable crashes rose to the level likely to receive a proper investigation by qualified crash investigators.
Crashes by Injury Severity in Pennsylvania (2023)
It should be noted that we can’t be sure how many investigations and reconstructions were actually performed in the commonwealth in 2023, that number isn’t reported to my knowledge. Instead, we’re making an educated assessment of the number of crashes that rose to the level of being likely to receive a proper investigation.
So about 1% of reportable crashes are truly investigated by the police. What about the other 99% of reportable crashes and 100% of the non-reportable crashes? Most are never investigated at all (which is why you should take your own pictures of the vehicles and scene if it’s safe to do so – see our blog post). If there’s a liability dispute and enough money on the line, an investigation may be performed by your insurance company or a firm hired by your insurance company. This typically happens several weeks after the crash at best. If a law firm is retained by any of the parties to the crash, the law firm may also decide to hire an investigator to look into liability – this could be months to years after the crash. In many of those cases, the conclusive evidence is long gone and the investigator must turn to witness statements and testimony to piece together a narrative before poking holes in the parts that don’t hold up against physics or the limited evidence available. Civil action is very different than criminal charges, and it’s common for civil cases to proceed all the way through trial without so much as a single photo or single piece of physical evidence documented or preserved from the crash. In fact, the lack of conclusive evidence makes it more likely that a trial will be needed to settle the dispute.
Here’s the point - don’t be fooled into believing that the police investigated your crash and will support your version of events if a dispute arises - that’s not their job. The police report will cover the basics and, at best, may have a detailed narrative of the officer’s thoughts when they responded to the crash. A description of tire marks on a police report is helpful but cannot be used to calculate impact speeds or reaction times. Without photographs and measurements, there’s not much to be concluded beyond supporting a driver’s claim that they heavily applied their brakes before the crash.
The police should still be your first call if you’re involved in a crash. But if you want to protect yourself and prove your case, you need a real and independent investigation. You need to call Evident.
Disclaimer: We are not attorneys and nothing contained in this post should be construed as legal advice. This post is for informational purposes only. The post discusses laws and procedures pertaining to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Laws and police procedures may vary from state to state.