How Important is it to have a Police Report?

I have a question related to personal injury. How important is having a police report when you are making a personal injury claim? Or just reporting to your insurance company that you’ve had an accident and maybe you just felt like oh I didn’t call the police because I was in a hurry, but then later you’re reporting your insurance the damage. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, that’s a great question because a lot of people don’t want to wait for the police and they just want to exchange information. It’s important for you to get a police report because you need documentation because everybody inherently is telling the truth at that time when people are around. But the moment you drive away people start lying and they start saying I didn’t say that. The person hit me, or this is how it happened. Then we run into an issue of liability and then the insurance company will deny, the at-fault party will deny coverage because they’ll say it’s not their drivers’ fault. Their driver said something different when they did the recorded statement.

So, now we have the problem of we may have to file suit and go through this process. It creates something I could have taken maybe an hour. Now it takes months and months even if you even get to that point. If it’s not very clear-cut. So, it’s very important and on the same subject, we need to get this. We need to ask for a long-form. A lot of sheriffs and law enforcement they don’t actually want to do this because it’s a lot of work. But a lot of times they just want to do a quick thing if there are no injuries because people feel pain the next day. They’d always feel pain the same day unless it’s pretty substantial. Then I say feel I got hit by a truck, so the long-form it goes into deeds detail and it was like a narrative of what they write in detail of what happened in the accident and it’s all a map.

In short form they don’t do any of those things. So and then, later on, we have one that the police cited that the other party at fault but because they didn’t do a long-form there the teenage driver that hit my client that my client didn’t speak English which is another problem we can talk about because they discriminate a lot towards people don’t understand the language. They took the word of a 17-year-old high school kid that wasn’t his fault after the police cited him and that they rejected liability because they said there’s no narrative on the long-form. So now we must file suit, in the end, we call the sheriff like it’s been a few months I don’t remember I did. So, it’s very important that you had a police report on a long-form.

Is there any way to remedy it later on after the accident has passed several days can you call the police back at that point or what yeah what’s common practice?

Yeah, we do. We call the police, we look for witnesses, we look at the actual damage the pictures to the car itself because that tells the story a lot of times because they might say whatever but in depending on how the car is dented how the impact was, there’s no way another scenario we have another one they said Oh your client, our client like but your client their phone in the car is completely damaged. So, for sure the pictures that your client hits something he’s substantial. The front end and my client have a date like they hit a pole so the pictures up a lot of witnesses and putting a little bit of pressure and we’ve been able to change my ability. But it is it’s more difficult more challenging. Yeah but this very thing is definitely an issue and that leads me to an immigration question. For more questions, call us at 833-4-BAD DAY (833-422-3329).

 

(Transcript from the video, transcribed but not reviewed)