Photo credit: CennoxX/Wikimedia Commons
On March 24, Toronto Police issued a release announcing they will no longer respond to reports of motor vehicle accidents involving minor personal injuries or property damage only. The new policy, which took effect March 29, was implemented in reaction to rising collision rates and shifting police priorities.
“Our current model right now is not sustainable,” Constable Caroline de Kloet told the CBC. “Officers highly trained are investigating what we call fender benders and it’s much more practical to send these people to … the collision reporting centre.”
While collision rates have ticked up by approximately five per cent each year since 2013 – reaching a three year high of 63,850 collisions last year – some, including Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers’ Daniel Michaelson, are sceptical of the policy.
“The question is judgement,” Michaelson said in an interview with CBC News. “I mean who determines if it’s a minor injury or not, especially in the moments after an accident when people are usually in quite a state of shock?”
While serious motor vehicle accidents will often lead to grave, readily apparent injuries, minor collisions may result in symptoms which do not appear for up to 2-3 weeks. For example, Car Accident Resource Experts (C.A.R.E.) lists “headaches, shock, anxiety, emotional swings, [and] confusion” as possible delayed afflictions which may be symptomatic of a concussion.
In addition to physical ailments, victims of motor vehicle accidents often experience serious emotional struggles following their experience.
“It’s not so much the severity of the crash or the severity of any resulting injury that counts – it’s how someone perceives it,” said Dr. Lynda Matthews, Head of the Rehabilitation Counselling Unit at the University of Sydney told Geared, in an interview with Geared. “If you perceive the crash as life-threatening, or if someone is killed in the accident, then that can influence your response.”
A British study from the early 2000s found that “at least one-third of all people involved in nonfatal accidents have posttraumatic stress disorder, persistent anxiety, depression, and phobias one year after the incident,” according to WebMD. Symptoms of post-motor vehicle accident anxiety can range from simple feelings of guilt and distress when reminded of the event, to having difficulty sleeping and suffering flashbacks.
There may be “rather large psychological complications even when the motor vehicle accidents have medically not been in the least bit serious,” affirmed study author Richard Mayou of the University of Oxford.
In a release, the Toronto Police said the decision to update their collision investigation model would reduce “the number of secondary collisions at, or near, the collision scene,” mitigate “delays commuters face as a result of these collisions,” and allow trained collision investigators to focus on “more serious collisions.” While these are worthy goals, the lack of a police presence at the scene of motor vehicle accidents may result in missing information and evidence in case of future personal injury lawsuits.
Victims of motor vehicle accidents should immediately reach out to Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers for a free, no-obligation consultation to assess the validity of a possible personal injury claim.
Greg Neinstein
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