This is a continuation of a series of articles regarding the different types of stressors that officers face daily, in their personal and professional lives from a personal point of view.
by Dave Robbins, retired Metro Officer
Returning to riding the motorcycle after my first accident was harrowing, to say the least. I was always on edge. Every revving engine, screeching tires and passing vehicle raised the hairs on my neck. I was constantly looking in my mirrors and panning the horizon. I didn’t want to be on the roadway. I never finished my motorcycle field training before the accident.
I had my doubts.
I went to accident scenes and tried to make heads or tails of the evidence presented to me.
It took a long while before I felt somewhat comfortable riding. You never feel comfortable after being involved in an accident.
My first exposure to a fatal accident investigation was near the Charleston underpass, by the “Holsum” Bread Company. My supervisor had already arrived and began walking me through the scene, describing skid marks, the dog who had been hit, the end position of the vehicle and the dead person (He was outside the vehicle) with the top half of his head missing and the brain lying in the gutter. After my amazement of the brain’s position and lack of apparent damage, I tried to recreate the pre and post-accident events. Very confusing. Even the officers on scene were having a difficult time deciphering what had happened.
The traffic Fatal Detail arrived a short time later and after a brief walk-through, described what had happened.
The dead person was the driver of the vehicle. He was not belted in. The impact into the guardrail, spun his vehicle, which caused his body to be partially ejected, but his leg was hung up in the window. His body was flung into the front of the windshield and his head hit the windshield wiper just right, causing his skull to pop open and eject his brain which rolled down the embankment and into the gutter. The dog (still alive, but with a broken leg) was a stray that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After attending a few of these scenes with senior motor officers, I felt comfortable with my accident investigations and even became interested in the dynamics of a vehicle accident.
For example;
A person with metal piercings/jewelry in their face will almost certainly receive “interesting” injuries when they fail to wear the seat belt and their face impacts the windshield, or if the airbag deploys and the metal snags in the material of the airbag. Flaps of skin are peeled back, requiring many stitches.
If a human skull hits a corner of a vehicle, it will pop open and launch the brain.
Drivers and passengers not wearing their seat belts that are ejected from the vehicle during the accident don’t always survive and sometimes are crushed by the same vehicle they were just in.
If someone fails to properly store objects in the trunk or outside of the passenger area of the vehicle, the objects become missiles when the vehicle is involved in an accident. In many cases, those objects were responsible for the deaths of the occupant(s).
Sometimes, a person that is literally run over by a vehicle will survive their injuries. One of my investigations involved a small child that was run over by a large SUV, over his chest area, causing a “hydraulic” effect, swelling his head to almost twice the normal size, and thankfully, the child survived.
Vehicles are now designed to crush and absorb the force of a collision, but able to keep the passengers relatively safe. Unlike your first car, which was probably built completely of steel and hardly dented the bumper when you ran into something.
The front windshield is a laminate and will act as a “net” when something impacts into it while the side windows break into small pieces to avoid large shards of glass flying around and also allow the window to break if someone is trapped inside.
Part of our duties was to investigate employee’s on-duty accidents. I found there was definitely a double standard. Many supervisors, without knowing anything of accident investigation, would automatically accuse the employee to be at fault. On many scenes, I would describe what had occurred, sometimes with witnesses help, and the supervisor would say, “So it’s our fault”. I would explain it again to reiterate that it wasn’t and get the same response. On many occasions I would ask if the supervisor would like to complete the accident report.
Some accidents were the employee’s fault, with varying degrees of damage. Some required citations to be issued by the supervisor, others did not meet the criteria by policy or statute for a citation, but some supervisors felt it was necessary to cite all employees.
After the accident, the employee was subjected to an “Accident Review Board” consisting of a board of department members to review the accident and the employee’s culpability and adjudicate administrative discipline, ranging from no punishment to hours of suspension.
Many ranking members of the department have “skated” from on-duty collisions without so much as a talking to. One lieutenant rear ended a citizen while riding his police motorcycle, causing injuries and never received a citation. I investigated a motor officer’s single vehicle accident consisting of striking a concrete barricade while responding to an officer’s request for assistance after being shot several times. No damage to the barricade. The bike was damaged, not beyond a few scrapes, and the officer was injured slightly. The supervisor arrived on scene and began writing a citation for “not maintaining a travel lane”. I strongly questioned that decision. The supervisor said he “had to”. I told him that he didn’t and to look at the circumstances.
It was frustrating at best, not knowing if we were being backed up by the department and our decisions, based on law, were even being considered.
I then realized that our traffic substation was not even noted on the LVMPD website as a substation, even though we offered all the services of a substation.
OF course, our substation was considered a “dinosaur” by department standards.
To be continued…
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