Keith Vodden Dr. Douglas Smith - Transports Canada

Analysis and Estimation of the Social Cost of Motor Vehicle Collisions in Ontario
3. Police response
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) provided hours expended by all staff, by all
levels, related to motor vehicle collisions they attended in 2004. Data are available related
to the following groupings of activities: initial collision; assistance provided to the initial
officer on the scene; court; follow-up; reporting; administration; SOCO 1 and collisionrelated
activities not otherwise specified).
In 2004, the OPP investigated 73,683 motor vehicle collisions and expended
325,641 staff-hours for these investigations. Although fatal, injury and PDO collisions
represent 1%, 19% and 80% respectively of the collisions investigated by the OPP this is
unlikely to represent the distribution of hours spent by police officers across these
collision severities. Instead we have assigned 15%, 45%, and 40% of OPP staff time
respectively by collision severity. This assumed allocation reflects both the degree of
difficulty per collision and volume of collisions by collision severity. On average this
distribution suggests 107, 10 and 2 hours are spent per fatal, injury and PDO collision
respectively. These become the factors used in 2004 and later years to assign hours by
police staff to all collisions including those not investigated by the OPP.
Collisions handled by the OPP represent 64% of fatal, 29% of injury and 33% of
PDO collisions in Ontario. We used the proportion of collisions handled by OPP officers
and the allocated amounts by collision severity (approximately 49,000, 147,000 and
130,000 hours for fatal, injury and PDO collisions respectively) to extrapolate OPP police
officer time to all collisions and police forces. This method may under-estimate police
involvement; if for example, more than one police force (OPP and a municipal police
force) attended a collision. The model allocates 990,000 hours of police time using the
unadjusted collision severities (i.e. from police reports) to reflect information available to
the police when deciding how much time to allocate to collisions.
4. Fire department response
We obtained data from The Office of the Fire Marshal related to responses by fire
departments in 2004. Fire departments responded to 33,082 motor vehicle “accidents”
and 2,618 vehicle extrications, not included in the previous number. In addition there
were 116 and 14 responses attributed to a vehicle “accident” and listed as fires with loss
and without loss respectively.
Although detail on the location of the fire response is not available from the data,
most of these “accidents” are likely HTA reportable collisions. As a result, we assign
35,830 responses by fire departments to motor vehicle collisions. We assume that fire
departments will respond to all fatal collisions with the remainder of calls going to injury
collisions.
1 Scenes of Crime Officer—officers who ensure any evidentiary material at the "crime scene" is
secured and properly documented.
28 TNS Canadian Facts, Social and Policy Research