Statewide DUI Lawyer: Police use "Crash" instead of "Accident" to inflame

An onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound of what it describes. Words like roar, meow, beep, woof, and boom do not typically enter into legal discussions because they are clumsy words we learned in third grade to connect what we think we heard to our linguistic development. They don’t belong in a serious person’s professional written nor spoken vocabulary.

So you would never read the following in a police report:

“I beeped at the driver when his engine roared. I used my siren to chirp at the driver and when I performed the PITT maneuver to make his car go boom in the ditch, I stopped and my canine partner demonstrated a woof.”

It is just as ridiculous for police officers to use the word “crash” in their police reports—a childish euphemism for a motor vehicle accident that belies the complexity of an event they frequently cannot discern nor prove.

Police and their trainers are using the word, “crash,” for an insidious reason all at taxpayer expense: to influence juries and absolve themselves of the duty to prove a causal link between alcohol and motor vehicle accidents. They want to appeal to the third grader in you not to think about whether alcohol truly caused an accident but to think of the terrible sound metal and glass objects make when they collide with one another. What a crash! The use of such terms in court is more prejudicial than probative.

However, police, trained by federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) officials and publication editors have been attempting to inject this inflammatory onomatopoeia into case evaluation and, ultimately, jury verdicts in drunk driving cases for decades.

Since 1997, the Federal Highway Administration has declared the more professional, less emotional, word “accident” dead in its publications:

“Along with the Department's Research and Special Programs Administration, the Federal Highway Administration has joined the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in declaring that the word ‘accident’ will no longer be used in materials we publish, in speeches or other statements, or in communications with the media and others.”

It is not true that “crash” is a “more appropriate term” for accident, as NHTSA and the police it trains suggest. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Crash is an evocative elementary school playground expression that may have described how someone fell off their bike at recess but doesn’t belong in the vocabulary of serious people attempting to discern causation in professional writings. It’s no more professional than “woof,” “meow,” or “boom.”

Shame on NHTSA and any police department that uses this language to enflame the media and juries all with taxpayer money. It attempts to replace logic with fear and dispassion with emotion-- and does so intentionally. If you hear the word “crash” spoken or written in this context, reject its use and mentally replace it with the more responsible alternative: motor vehicle accident.