No injury, no report

by Rea
in News
— 22 Jan, 2016

This car crash occurred at 9 a.m. on Martin Luther King Day, on State Route 203 near the onramp to 395. According to Mammoth Lakes Fire Marshal Thom Heller, one car slid coming down the onramp from the north side of 395 through the intersection and hit a passenger vehicle that was heading onto the southbound onramp. There was one injury, and both vehicles were totaled. “We ended up having to remove the door off of the one vehicle, which was the Subaru, in order to get the individual extricated out of the car and onto the backboard and taken to the hospital by the Mono County Paramedics,” he said. Photo courtesy: June Simpkins.

Car crash victims learn State requirements the hard way.

Over the holiday period, Mammoth Lakes Police Department and Mono County Sheriffs Officers responded to more than 200 accidents and calls for service, but some locals were unpleasantly surprised to find out that police are not required to fill out reports for accidents that don’t involve an injury.

“California does not require a police report for a non-injury traffic collision,” wrote Hannah DeGoey, Executive Assistant to the Chief of Police, in an e-mail to The Sheet.

DeGoey said that over busy periods, and especially when those periods occur simultaneously with snow and ice, police are already stretched to the limit even without having to write lengthy reports.

“On days with inclement weather, as you can imagine, the calls for service (stuck cars, overturned vehicles, traffic collisions with injuries, traffic control, et cetera) increase exponentially on top of our spectrum of other non-traffic related service calls,” she wrote. “Filling out a report for every single non-criminal and non-injury traffic collision would have a substantial impact and could prevent servicing another call that may be a more urgent and potentially criminal matter. MLPD simply doesn’t have the manpower.”

However, some people said that it left them open to potential problems in dealing with insurance companies.

Crowley Lake resident Lorraine Koenig was driving up to Mammoth Mountain Ski Area on Dec. 12 when, she claims, a driver traveling down the hill was unable to make a curve and “headed straight toward my car [which was] traveling up hill.”

Koenig, who was driving with her young daughter in tow, said she turned the wheel into a snow bank to avoid a head-on collision with the oncoming car.

“I did not collect witness info at the scene as I was in a bit of shock and believed that the guy who hit me would be honest,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Sheet. However, she said, “he is telling his insurance company that I crossed over the yellow line [and] ran into him.”

Koenig told The Sheet that she did complain of a sore neck following the accident, but did not insist she be taken to the hospital.

When asked specifically what qualifies as an “injury,” DeGoey said “if someone complains of pain, it is treated as an injury.” However, Koenig said, “I did specifically tell the officer that my neck was sore,” yet a police report was not filled out for her accident.

“While I was initially upset about the no report,” Koenig told The Sheet, the responding Officer Grant Zemel, “was nice enough to get back to me even thought the initial contact at MLPD was skeptical and said he did not need to contact me. It seems that if they took a report the gentleman who hit me might have told the truth or at least I might have known he was going to blatantly lie and I could have thought to get witness info…For me I was so stunned that I could have also used the help [of a police report].”

Others involved in accidents during the snowy weather were also surprised that police did not take reports. Bishop resident Michael Cleaver, who delivers produce for Abundant Harvest Organics, said “it was really kind of bizarre” that the police didn’t issue a ticket or write a report for an accident he possibly caused.

“It was really weird, they were just like, ‘Okay, get out of here.’”

According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, motorists must fill out a Traffic Accident Report SR 1 if anyone is injured, no matter how minor, or property damage exceeds $750. This would presumably also require a police report, though it is not stated specifically on its web site.

Police reports entail such things as diagrams of accident scenes, descriptions of weather and road conditions, and position of vehicles—all of which can bolster an insurance claim.

However, some accidents go unreported to the DMV, and police are not always called to the scene of minor accidents, which DeGoey said are civil matters. These are “generally resolved through the exchange of insurance information,” she said.

Legally, in California, the exchange of information is the only thing legally required of those involved in a non-injury accident.

Following in kind, she said, “Citizens cannot demand (or strongly insist) the police fill out a report for a civil matter,” despite the fact that it may help them with an insurance claim.

Although Officer Zemel wrote Koenig a small statement upon request, she is still seeking witnesses to the accident.