Witness Questions Police Crash Reports in Assigning Blame for Truck Accidents

This story appears in the Feb. 11 print edition of Transport Topics.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The use of police accident reports as the sole basis to assign fault in truck-involved crashes is not always a reliable method, an accident reconstruction expert told a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration advisory panel last week.

“The report itself is not, in my opinion, stand-alone enough to determine causation,” said Jeffrey Kidd, a former Georgia state trooper and president of Atlanta-based Collision Specialists Inc.

Kidd’s comments were made here at a Feb. 5 meeting of an advisory subcommittee tasked by FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro to help the agency come up with an accurate crash-accountability process for its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.

The topic has generated controversy among trucking, shipping and broker stakeholders, including a renewed call by American Trucking Associations for FMCSA to immediately establish a process to remove from carriers’ crash records accidents where it was evident that the carrier was not to blame.

ATA’s statement was based at least in part on Kidd’s contention that FMCSA could not determine fault in many instances based solely on information from police reports.

“This may be the case with some crashes, but not when a drunk driver rear-ends a gasoline tanker or the driver of a stolen car crosses a grassy median and strikes a truck head on,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a Feb. 7 statement. Graves was referring to a specific incident last month.

“It is clearly inappropriate for FMCSA to use these types of crashes to prioritize trucking companies for future government intervention, especially when responsibility for the crash is so obvious,” Graves said.

“Including these types of crashes in the calculation of carriers’ CSA scores paints an inappropriate picture for shippers and others that these companies are somehow unsafe,” Graves added.

Fatal crashes currently are listed on a carrier’s safety profile but do not contain information on whether the carrier was at fault in the crash. However, a carrier’s percentile score in the Crash BASIC category (one of the seven CSA safety ratings) remains private.

Using police accident reports as a basis to assign fault in truck crashes was FMCSA’s favored process until last year. In March, Ferro said  the agency would delay “until further notice” its plans to use police reports as the basis for FMCSA’s fault determination process.

At the time, Ferro said the agency had received some feedback raising questions about the “reliability” of the police reports.

In his briefing last week, Kidd said the reliability depends on such factors as the extent of the investigating officer’s training and experience and whether evidence from an accident scene is too quickly disturbed to ease post-accident traffic congestion.

After his briefing, Kidd told Transport Topics that a police accident report is essentially a “reporting document,” and not a “100% foolproof report as far as causation.”

Most officers who investigate crashes are not well-versed in the role braking components can play in accidents, or in the use of electronic logging devices and electronic control module data and other telematics that can be used to collect evidence, said Kidd, who said he has investigated about 3,500 accidents.

“Most officers do not have extensive accident training,” he said.

In Georgia, for example, there are some 59,000 sworn officers statewide, but only about 200 are fully certified accident investigators, Kidd said.

Another accident reconstruction expert who spoke to the subcommittee last week — James Hrycay of Hrycay Consulting Engineers Inc. in Windsor, Ontario — agreed with Kidd that an investigator’s training and experience play an important role in accident investigations. He also said he believes law enforcement generally is doing a good job of determining causality in most serious accidents.

He said police accident reports have the “potential” to be the basis of determining whether a trucker could — or could not — have prevented an accident.

“But you have to be careful which accidents you’re going to focus on,” Hrycay added.

That’s part of the problem, said subcommittee member Robert Petrancosta, vice president of safety for Con-way Freight, Ann Arbor, Mich., after the briefings.

The briefings underscored the fact that the sheer number of accidents on U.S. highways creates fault-determination challenges for FMCSA.

“Maybe the better solution is to change the definition of a crash for CSA purposes,” Petrancosta said, adding, “If I hit a deer and bust a radiator, it’s considered a reportable crash. But who cares?”

Subcommittee member Jeffrey Tucker, CEO of freight broker Tucker Co. Worldwide Inc., Cherry Hill, N.J., said the briefings confirmed to him that the most serious truck accidents “get appropriate eyes on them.”

“But it also solidified in my mind that all of the data that we’re getting on motor carriers has a subjective nature to it, and in the eye of the beholder, there’s a risk of error in all of it,” Tucker told TT.