Fighting a Bad Police Report in an Auto Accident Case
If there is an auto accident in Colorado the Police will often respond if the accident is serious or happens on public roadway. Routinely, the police fill out a report. They also will possibly issue tickets. The question remains, is the police’s word at the scene the final word as to who was at fault?
The short answer is: no.
Police make mistakes. The Denver Police Department acknowledged in 2017 there were over 1000 errors made in reports. These reports typically contain the information of the drivers, insurance information, information about the cars, rough information about the accident, and even diagrams of what happened. However, the police reports often contain errors or are wrong altogether. Whether it’s because an officer was fed misinformation from a witness or they were just mistaken, it happens.
The question is, what can you do about it? If you were ticketed at the scene, do you lose a right to get an insurance claim? If you were badly hurt but the other party wasn’t ticketed, does that mean no one was at fault? No.
The decider of fault at the end of the day, is a jury or judge at trial. Parties can speculate as to what a jury might find beforehand. That speculation will often drive negotiations for an insurance claim.
What can you do with a bad police report?
There are a number of things you can do to help improve your situation if you think a police report is wrong. This begins with getting an experienced and aggressive personal injury attorney. A personal injury attorney will be able to be proactive in your case and help disprove the police report or findings.
The tools that personal injury attorneys use to fight bad police reports are expansive. First, a lawyer can have witnesses communicate with the police and try to get their stories taken into account. The lawyer can also help get the relevant information to a district attorney or police agency to affect the outcome in a criminal case.
It should be expected that a personal injury attorney will get a competent investigator involved early. Speaking with witnesses, requesting surveillance, and taking photographs of the scene is crucial to fighting the case. The evidence that you can discover in this investigatory will sometimes upend the police’s findings and report.
An expert can also be hired to investigate and conduct an accident reconstruction. Police will often try to do a rough accident reconstruction. However, they often have little or no training and without proper expertise, the police reconstructions can even be barred from coming into court proceedings.
If you’ve been hurt from an accident or involved in a personal injury case in Aspen, Glenwood Springs, or Vail please call the personal injury attorneys at Kalamaya Goscha at 970-315-2365.