Chicago cops have errors in crash reports SERIOUSLY

It's not uncommon for judges to dismiss tickets against drivers on the grounds that the citations contain major errors, like misidentifying the street where an alleged traffic violation occurred, because the mistakes call into question the police officer's accuracy in providing other information on the ticket.

While such blunders can simply be a lucky break for the driver if no one else is involved, the consequences of police documentation errors on public safety are potentially huge when crashes occur and people are hurt or killed, experts say.

This shortcoming has unfortunately been the case in Chicago for a long time, according to research that City Hall solicited, then tried to keep from the public.

Flawed or incomplete accident data compromise city transportation experts' ability to make good decisions about where to target spending for safety-related traffic fixes and install red-light cameras, the researchers in the city-commissioned study concluded.

State records show that Chicago data on traffic crashes have been wildly inaccurate over the years, with deaths underreported by as much as 179 percent, while the volume of angle crashes often associated with running red lights has been inflated by one-third in a snapshot taken six years ago.

More than 70 percent of crash reports filled out by Chicago Police Department officers were missing important data, and 30 percent had errors, according to the research conducted by the Illinois Department of Transportation at the city's request in 2008, based on 2006 data. Street names were frequently misreported, as was the proximity of crashes to intersections.

City officials said they are now trying to correct the problems through the improved training of police officers and clerical workers who compile the data, an easier-to-use accident form and better analysis of the raw data received.

"Extensive and repeated training is critical to improving the quality of the data. And we've seen improvements,'' said Pete Scales, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation, which receives Police Department crash reports, reviews the data and passes it along to IDOT. He said errors in three key fields of the 106-field police accident report — "primary cause," "crash type" and "injury" — have declined dramatically since the changes.

The integrity of crash data has taken on added importance with Mayor Rahm Emanuel's controversial push for speed cameras, which the City Council approved last week. Since 2003, red-light cameras in Chicago have caught millions of violators for fines up to $100. New speed camera fines offer the potential of a revenue bonanza for the city.

The experts who conducted the study found that the city took wrongly filled-out forms at face value and routinely plugged the information into its crash database.

"The Illinois Department of Transportation validates each of the reports with software and manually to ensure that the coded data on the report corresponds with the narrative provided by the law enforcement reporting agency," the research report said. "The Chicago Police Department, however, enters the crash data exactly as it appears in the hard copy of the crash report."

City officials dismissed the impact of the sloppy work, saying state transportation officials double-check the forms for consistency and accuracy, conduct backup fact-finding and make corrections to the accident reports.

A vivid example involved traffic fatalities. City totals were much smaller because they generally reflected only victims who died at the scene. State policy is to follow up on those hospitalized after a crash, some of whom die of injuries hours or days later.

But even with IDOT catching errors, the data can only be as good as the weakest link.

The failure of a police officer to put check marks on all the primary reporting boxes on an accident form or to take the time to write accurate narratives of the incidents means that certain types of crashes are grossly underreported, while others are exaggerated, officials acknowledged.

In turn, public funding that is spent to implement safety remedies is sometimes wasted on unnecessary roadway projects or diverted elsewhere, allowing dangerous traffic situation lead to repeat accidents.

Experts at CDOT have been aware of the problem for at least four years. They expressed concerns in writing in 2008 that bad data compromised their ability to make sound decisions on where to best focus road safety spending and position red-light cameras, records show.

Blaming sloppy police record-keeping and an absence of quality control over data, the experts concluded that city numbers on crashes were way off.

In 2006, for example, they said the city counted 63 traffic deaths in Chicago while a state database they considered far more accurate put the number at 176 deaths. That same year, records show, the city reported 1,594 victims of serious injuries in crashes in Chicago; the state pegged it at 3,337.

At the same time, city numbers for some key crash categories were far higher than the state's. The city count in 2006 for crashes involving pedestrians was 4,945, compared with 3,909 totaled by the state. For angle crashes, the city total in 2006 was 24,576, the state 16,392.

The internal alarm over untrustworthy crash data was first raised by officials at CDOT and the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications in a 2008 white paper, three years before Emanuel became mayor. Last month, his administration refused to release the document to the Tribune, saying it was exempt from disclosure under the state Freedom of Information Act.

The state, however, did turn over the city's findings in response to a similar open-records request. The research found its way into state documents because the city eventually used it to obtain a $250,000 IDOT grant aimed at improving the accuracy of its numbers.

"Without accurate data on the seriousness of the injury and relation of the crash to the intersection, the crash rate calculations and prioritization will be erroneous, and could result in the misdirection of funds," read the city's grant application.