Absence of Coordinated Reporting Hampers Accident Analysis

An automobile accident occurs somewhere in the United States about every two seconds, producing not only a lot of crumpled metal and blood on the pavement but also millions of hours of investigation and mountains of paperwork for law enforcement.

Police agencies are the source of much of what we know about automobile safety, because they are the early-warning system that theoretically alerts the public about safety defects, dangerous drivers and poorly engineered roads.

Although most experts say police get good marks for training and professionalism, the system itself has defects. Some accidents receive superficial or flawed investigations, problems other than driver error often are overlooked and even the best reports get lost in an antiquated data system.

What the U.S. really has is 50 different accident investigation systems, operated by hundreds of agencies with differing standards, all generally stuck with the same 1950s information technology.

As a priority, accident investigation, particularly for property damage crashes, ranks near the bottom.

“Most people would rather have police investigating and preventing homicides, robberies and cats in the tree than spend time on noninjury accidents,” said Steve Switzer, a former accident investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “Few cadets want to work traffic. That’s not what they show on TV.”

Nonetheless, 41,821 people die on the highways every year, more than twice the number of deaths nationwide from homicide and negligent manslaughter. Indeed, the 16.4 million annual accidents, documented in a recent federal report, exceed the 11.6 million criminal offenses reported each year.

Police agencies across the state and nation vary widely in the amount of training they provide traffic patrol officers. In many cases, agencies provide little intermediate or advanced training.

California requires only eight hours of basic training in how to conduct an automobile accident investigation for police, providing no instruction in automobile mechanics, accident reconstruction or highway engineering.

But some localities try to do better.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department provides 20 hours of training, the city of Long Beach 40 hours and the California Highway Patrol 86 hours.

In many departments, officers receive advanced training and attend one of the nation’s three major accident investigation schools: at Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina or the University of South Florida.

But that’s no guarantee that an officer who arrives at an accident scene will be equipped to determine whether a shredded tire caused a sport utility vehicle to turn over or whether the tire shredded as a consequence of the accident.

Joseph Carra, director of the federal government’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis--the central repository for all accident reporting--acknowledges the uneven quality of investigation: “It varies from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction.”

In one of the few known studies of investigation accuracy, Northwestern University found in 1991 that police accident reports were factually accurate only 70% of the time. And that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the validity of the investigators’ analyses.

Bill Edmonds, who spent 22 years with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and helped establish its accident investigation training program, estimates that 15% to 20% of police conclusions are rejected by insurance companies as incorrect or unsubstantiated.

Edmonds, who now operates a private accident investigation firm, Crash Facts, in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., said few police officers are trained to look for defects or to consider poor highway design.

“If there’s a question about the brakes, they put their foot on the brake and pump it. Well, they just destroyed the evidence,” Edmonds said. “Nothing is ever done with highway design.”

An exception is the CHP. The agency runs eight special multidisciplinary accident investigation teams able to diagnose any cause of a serious pileup. Each includes two CHP officers, with more than 300 hours of classroom training, and a state highway engineer. But the teams investigate only the worst accidents.

Stan Perez, CHP’s chief for enforcement services, said CHP reports are more thoroughly reviewed by supervisors than are reports at any other agency he is aware of. He said he believes CHP report accuracy is nearly perfect.

As police churn out accident reports, accurate or not, the data flow upstream in massive rivers to state and federal agencies. But much of the information is incompatible and not particularly useful to safety experts.

In California, local police accident reports are sent to the CHP, where they are coded and keyed into the Statewide Integrated Traffic Reporting System.

It contains data on injuries, time of day, alcohol involvement and other facts collected by police. A sampling of this data is forwarded to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which uses it in various databases.

Unfortunately, the data from California and other states are often inconsistent. And nowhere can investigators find a unified national database that allows computerized searching of accident report texts.

“There is no reason not to have a standardized accident reporting form,” said Thomas M. Klein, a Los Angeles attorney who represents automobile manufacturers and conducts his own accident research.

Klein recalls that in a recent effort to examine accidents for a client, he could find only four states--Michigan, Texas, Florida and North Carolina--that require reports to contain four key pieces of information: the vehicle identification numbers of the vehicles involved in the accident; a TADS, or total accident damage index; an injury index called CABCO; and a report on occupant ejection from the vehicle. In an ideal world, police not only would use standardized reporting forms, but also would dispense with written reports and file electronically from a handheld computer. Hertz and Avis have used them for years to speed customers on their way: If police could do so, accident data would flow instantly up the channels.

An investigator in Washington would be able to search in real time for information about the 45,000 accidents that occur every day. On any given day, for example, one might want to know about accidents that involved a specific SUV model, serious injuries and shredded tires.

If that capability existed, some people who lost their lives in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires might still be alive.

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Ralph Vartabedian responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.