My wife and I were driving on South Geddes Street not long ago, heading toward Interstate 690, when we came upon an afternoon vehicular accident that had apparently just happened. An SUV was stopped in the middle of the street, showing significant damage on one side, while a banged-up car that had also been involved was pulled over along the curb on nearby Bellevue Avenue.
We could see the drivers in their vehicles, both still behind the wheel, seemingly in that stunned just-after-an-accident-and-in-disbelief frame of mind. Some motorists had already pulled over to help, while others circled warily around the SUV, which blocked much of that crossroads. The situation seemed fresh and potentially chaotic. As we passed through, with no easy way to stop, we immediately called 911.
I’m doing my best here to remember the subsequent conversation — it was hardly a place or time where we were taking notes — but the 911 call taker quickly asked us, as you’d expect:
Were there any injuries?
We told her we didn’t think so, though we couldn’t be positive. At that point, the call taker asked if the drivers would be able to move the vehicles out of the street. We told her it was impossible to be sure, and the best thing would be sending an officer to the scene, but it quickly became clear that probably wasn’t going to happen.
The call taker explained: There’s a new police policy in Syracuse in which officers don’t respond to accidents unless there are injuries, severe damage or the vehicles truly can’t move out of traffic. Otherwise, it’s up to the drivers to get their vehicles out of the way, and then to share insurance information before reporting the collision themselves, via the civilian MV104 “report of a motor vehicle accident” forms available online, from the state.
We told the call taker that as far as we knew, one of the vehicles was still blocking that busy street. She replied that she would see what she could do, but it didn’t sound certain or even probable that any officers would be going to that scene.
To my wife and I, the whole thing — the simple chance the police might not go to what seemed like an accident that obstructed traffic — felt jarring. As a result, I had a couple of conversations with Kieran Coffey, spokesperson for the SPD, who said — while a little more is involved than what the call taker explained — what she described is fundamentally true.
For several months, the city police have been following an internal policy in which officers aren’t mandated to respond if an automotive accident falls within certain specific criteria.
Basically, that would involve accidents where there are no reported injuries; where damage is less than $1,000; where there’s no destruction of public property; and there are “no unusual or extenuating circumstances.” In those situations, after a collision, drivers are expected to handle accidents themselves, face to face, by sharing insurance information and then filling out the MV104s, once they both get home.
Even before any of this, Coffey said, the SPD already had a formal written policy in which an officer — after responding to an accident — could tell drivers to trade information on their own and then use the state forms if the situation was simple and matched the earlier stipulations. The newer internal policy expands that approach to mean officers aren’t required to go to those scenes at all, at least in those circumstances — though it seems a little murky, as illustrated by what we saw on South Geddes, about how you can be sure how many of those stipulations apply in the tumult just after a collision.
The problem, Coffey said, is diminished staffing. With about 380 officers, the SPD is roughly 40 officers short of available budgeted positions. He said the time involved in showing up at no-one’s-been-hurt traffic accidents, such as “fender benders” — and then documenting them — takes on lower priority than dealing with the more immediate and urgent situations many officers confront each day.
Coffey said officers would always prefer to respond to accidents. But when they’re swamped, the departmental belief is that motorists can work things out efficiently between themselves, thus giving officers time to prioritize other calls.
I understand the point. But I also thought of this:
At 66, I’ve been involved in a handful of accidents in 50 years of driving, and have stopped to help in other situations. I’ve noticed one thing is often true, an observation I expect you share: Drivers, after a collision, can become emotional, sometimes confrontational. Adrenalin is pumping, for logical reasons, after any impact in a car. There’s also the possibility of drug or alcohol involvement — which officers are far more likely to recognize, than civilians.
What’s more, for everyday people, a vehicular accident — even when no one is hurt — can instantly become an overwhelming and life-changing problem. You know immediately that it will have a disruptive impact on such everyday routines as getting to work or getting the kids to school. There’s also the sickening feeling of alarm — especially if you’re broke — about just how much it might cost in repairs.
Which means — whether the damage is $500 or $1,000 or $15,000 — tempers can easily flare about who’s at fault between drivers in the minutes just after a crash, especially at this time in 2026 when many drivers already seem angrier and edgier on the road than ever.
For my part — at these moments when most folks aren’t exactly thinking rationally — I’ve always felt much better when a patrol car pulls up and an officer emerges to check things out, to settle everyone down through simple presence and then to look over what happened before filling out a report.
That matters, for substantial reasons.
Joe Stanley — a longtime Syracuse personal injury and worker’s compensation lawyer — said a police presence, for everyday drivers, takes on giant importance. Over the years, he’s represented thousands of people involved in automobile accidents. A police report is the “gold standard” in these situations, he said, the first thing an insurance company will ask to review in assessing responsibility.
“Without them,” Stanley said of those reports, “you’re pretty much out of luck.”
He gave this example: You’re stopped at a red light. Someone runs the light before it changes and slams into you. You’ve got liability insurance but not collision coverage, meaning the damage is potentially a major financial problem in your life. As you sit there in your badly dented but still-running vehicle, the only solace is that it seems pretty obvious the other driver is at fault.
Yet without the police responding to the scene, sure, you can exchange insurance information — but there’s nothing to prevent the other driver from giving a dramatically different account of what happened in the following days, and there’s no real way for investigators to doublecheck that story long after the fact.
“The veracity,” as Stanley said, “is sometimes suspect.”
All of a sudden, without a police officer serving as what Stanley called “an arbiter” at the site of the crash, an everyday driver could face what’s essentially a devastating financial situation for an accident that’s absolutely not that driver’s fault.
“Without a police report, what does the insurance company do?” Stanley asked of final determinations. “It’s 50-50.”
It’s also worth noting, as Syracuse.com reported last week, that Gov. Kathy Hochul has been saying a major factor in brutally high insurance rates in New York is a surge in phony claims, based on staged accidents — another reason that an officer’s observations, in the aftermath, could be vitally important.
A quick Internet search reveals the trend of police departments asking drivers to handle non-injury accidents on their own is nationwide — but there are places looking toward potential solutions. In North Carolina, for instance, some communities — confronting the same too-many-collisions-and-too-few-officers situation cited by Coffey — are sending specially trained civilian crash investigators to minor accidents, thus offering a formal municipal response while freeing police officers from that duty.
As for Stanley, his suggestion to clients is that a police report is so precious, after an accident, that it merits a long wait. If it’s going to take officers a couple of hours to get to the scene of a crash, he thinks it’s worth it for a driver to hang around until the police can arrive — which Stanley sees as a compromise answer to the existing policy, an option that merits consideration by officials at City Hall.
Otherwise?
For everyday drivers without a police report after an accident, Stanley described the way things can end up as “the wild, wild west.”
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