Ah, Houston. The first place I lived where they payed their officers to show up for traffic court. Ugh!
âShould you take pictures, safely, before moving the vehicles?â
No. Getting out of your car in a lane of travel to take photos isnât safe, so your question is on a wrong premise. Just move the cars. Everyone can tell who hit who, where, based on where the damage is.
Perhaps it depends on your state and the quality (or lack thereof) of the insurance company the person whom hit you has. The parking garage collision was CLEARLY the other guys fault (car was 3/4 in my lane (yes, lines marked on pavement) and cars were in same position when cop arrived. Also, if a police report / accident report is filed by the person telling the cop the details, and lies, it can further be used against the person in any court proceeding for lying to a police officer. We did exchange insurance, etcâŚbut it didnât matter b/c the insurance company essentially said âno police report, your word against hisâŚgo pound sand, weâre not paying for your damageâ.
In the latter case, where I forced the accident report, the company ignored me (when they were to contact my ins. company) until I called them 3 weeks later and they used ignorance as an excuse, gave the same run-around about âwhoâs fault is it really??â, then I said there was a police report (which I am SURE they had in their file, as it was suddenly âfoundâ). Anyways, they sent an adjuster and was cleared-up and my damage was fixed.
So, while I agree, cops sign-up to catch the bad guys, it says âto protect and serveâ. Whether it is a suspicious guy looking in car windows, the domestic violence call from the (soon-to-be)Ex for the nâth time, the jay walker, the speeder, or the car accident. Itâs all part of the job. If I could cherry-pick what I wanted to do in my job, Iâd pick only the cool/interesting/promotion-worthy stuff too.
A copâs job isnât to make your insurance claim go smoothly. Thatâs between you, the other driver, and your insurance companies. There is no reason for the state to get involved in that until you take it to court. The cop was called to facilitate the info exchange and determine if any traffic laws had been broken. If he followed his departmentâs policy and stateâs law in whether or not to write a police report, talk to the local city council or state legislature to have that policy/law changed. Your remedy was to sue the other driver and subpoena any witnesses (including the officer) to court. Even if he didnât do a report, he saw where your cars ended up, right?. If you didnât go that route, you only have yourself to blame.
Are there places you are aware of where officers donât get paid to go to traffic court?
Since you seem to be a LEO, if you were at some point in your career dealing w/ auto accidents, how many times in how many years were you subpoenaâd to testify in a case which was < $750 in auto damages and no human injuries?
Even at that time of the garage collision, it wasnât worthwhile to me to spend my time, money, and vacation time to deal with the <$1k costs. Even less so today. BUT, if Iâm going to be imposed upon by anotherâs actions causing damage to my vehicle while they checked their phone (or whatever), I might as well use the services of the police which a decent share of my property taxes goes towards to support.
While I am sure I receive benefits which are taken for granted which I donât readily see/experience first-hand, the roughly $2K+ per year from just my portion property taxes which goes to the local police pension/etc means a beat cop is asked to spend 20-30 minutes filling out a police report once every ~5+ yearsâŚI think thatâs a fair request. I also understand that if a call came over the radio which required his/her response, Iâd have to deal with it. But, as for the parking garage incident, he was literally across the street in the police station, just warm instead of out in the cold. Perhaps dealing w/ a prisoner, perhaps just waiting to go out on his patrol.
To answer your question⌠in 7 years on patrol, never.
I get that it wasnât worth it for you to sue. Plus, if you had a $1k deductible and it made no sense to go through your insurance. But thatâs a risk you take by having a $1k deductible. If you had a $250 deductible, you would have gone through insurance and they may have gone to bat for you. In that case, if they donât, the fault lies in your insurance company. What was your deductible? If it was $1k, did you lower it so this doesnât happen again in the future?
You make some great points, and I donât necessarily disagree with them. But a crash in a parking lot is almost always a civil matter - yours was for sure. You are heading down a slippery slope when you are of the opinion that the police should be more involved in civil matters than they already are. A lot of people donât trust the police. Do you trust them to handle more civil matters properly - the things that lawyers, judges and juries normally decide? I worked with a lot of guys that I wouldnât trust to handle a nuanced civil matter. Iâve also seen seasoned police officers disagree on who is at fault in a crash that wasnât just a parking lot fender bender. It makes it even harder when people lie to the police.
In your case it may have been completely cut and dried. Anyone could have come along and investigated your crash and figured out it was the other guyâs fault. But that is not the case in a huge amount of parking lot fender benders (and other civil matters). And I think thatâs a big reason that many states and localities donât require officers to to reports in that situation. There is also the time factor. I responded to twice as many non-reportable crashes and I did reportable ones. Every minute I was working on a report, I wasnât doing other police duties. For lots of departments, thatâs not a big deal. For some, (mine for instance was an urban department with high crime) it is a huge deal to have officers spending more time on administrative things.
The process for compiling a crash report isnât that complicated, but its not that easy either. I wouldnât be opposed to a simpler report for non-reportable crashes as opposed to reportable ones. I think thatâs a decent compromise.
Ded was $500, it wasnât worth it to me to have a claim on my record for the ~$150 difference, regardless of at-fault. Without report, it was he said/she said, and unlikely I would have gotten his company to cover the $500 w/o documentation or âproofâ. The cop didnât leave a card, take our info, nothing. So also had little to go short of spending the time/effort/etc to track him down as the officer responding and then subpoena, court, etcâŚwhich, as you mentioned, never happened in your 7yrs. Being a civil matter and subpoena a LEO, well, his/her memory may not recall any facts (conveniently or not) to aid in the small claims case.
As mentioned, when I did get the report (learned from the above) where I was hit from behind and he(driver) said he wasnât paying attention. The report made the process as smooth as possibleâŚonce I reminded them of the report. Here is an âat faultâ state, perhaps different from your days on the force, in your state.
I get that the claim wasnât worth it for $150, but what if your insurance had gone after the other driver and you got your $500 back? Would it have been worth it then for $650? For me it would have been. That was your option if you didnât feel like suing. Honestly, I think that was a pretty good option. Would you still handle it the same way if this happened again, or would you give more consideration to going through insurance? Personally, I wouldnât be concerned with the he said/she said issue if I knew I was in the right. I would still fight with my insurance company to make me whole. Thatâs what Iâm paying my premiums for. I didnât like how they handled the claim, I would leave and go to a different company. And of course, if itâs safe (in a parking lot it usually is), you should take pictures. Not sure if your experience happened before camera phones, but these days, thereâs no excuse for not taking pictures of the scene for a non-reportable fender bender. Itâs not on the police to document evidence in civil matters.
As for your actual crash experience with the police, I now see why you are so sore about it. If the cop didnât leave his card or facilitate the info exchange, then yeah, I would be pissed too. That was probably less work than his policies require. Whenever I investigated a non-reportable accident, I handled the info exchange (unless they told me they already did it and didnât need me to) and gave all parties the info on official paper with my departmentâs and my contact information on it. If I had run out of that paper (it happened a few times), I made sure the parties had my info and knew how to follow up with me if needed. We are an at-fault state too. But rear-enders canât be compared to most parking lot fender benders. Rear-enders are usually the easiest crashes to settle even without a police report.
Sorry the police let you down in your time of need. I know it happens, but it shouldnât. Especially when just a little more work probably would have saved you a bunch of grief.
The only thing I would have changed w/ the parking garage incident would have been to firmly request the report. That was really all I would have needed to get the other insurance company to do what they should have done in the first place. That said, it was some 3rd rate company that âprovides coverageâ but fights any/every pay-out, since it is mandatory to have auto coverage here (and perhaps all statesâŚno clue there).
There is knowing youâre right and proving it. The collision was pre-smart phone days, and didnât carry a camera around, a photo would have done me a little justice, Iâm sure. I chalked it up to life experience and it âpaid offâ later in life w/ the 2nd accident. Which, still wasnât happy w/ the state trooper, as he said âI donât see any damageâ and was fighting writing the report as well. I stood my position and even the guyâs insurance adjuster saw the damage and wrote a check for the repairs. Had I not the report, Iâd only have had my pictures at the timeâŚand probably a slug fest getting what was due.
I would agree with this, if they also could not write citations there.
Iâll just name one - Dallas in the early 80âs.
I doubt it would make you feel any better @dgoedken, but based on what you said about the other driverâs insurance company, a police report wouldnât have necessarily helped you. If they were the type of insurance company that denies every claim directly from the drivers of cars that their clients hit, then you would have had to sue or go through insurance to get paid. Why would going through insurance matter? Because even though they are a shyster insurance company, they still have to work with other insurance companies from time to time and need to get paid by them too. They would be willing to deal with them a lot more reasonably than with you. You, on the other had, they will never have to deal with again, so they can tell you to kiss off. Sadly, insurance companies like this are able to operate the way they do because of how people like you handle parking lot fender benders. You said, âyour driver hit me, pay me!â They said, âprove it!â We donât even know what their driver said to them about the accident. Maybe he was honest about hitting you and they were bluffing. You never tried to call their bluff, you just gave up. Why would they pay without a little push back? It only makes sense for them to deny your claim at first.
Iâm making a lot of assumptions here and Iâm not trying to let the cop that obviously did you a disservice off the hook. He should have given you something. I donât know the law and policy in your area, so he didnât necessarily need to write you a report though. You seemed like you learned from the experience, which is good. But I hope you learned that having a police report HELPS. If you think that having a police report is all you need in these situations, you might end up disappointed in the future. You have to be willing to fight these crappy insurance companies too.
Oh, I thought you were talking about now. Yeah, that doesnât happen anymore.