Publication from Caroline Russell: Letter to Mayor about reducing road death and injury through policing

Dear Sadiq,

Reducing road death and injury through policing

Thank you for the conversation at Mayor’s Question Time on 21 July about reducing road death and injury through policing. I raised with you the number of investigations of fatal and serious collisions carried out by the Serious Collision Investigation Unit (SCIU).

In your answer to Mayor’s Question 2021/4431, you told me that the SCIU investigated 458 serious injury collisions and 205 fatal collisions between 2018 and 2020.[1]

This equates to 4.4 per cent of the 10,510 serious collisions and 61.9 per cent of the 331 fatal collisions recorded by Transport for London (TfL) in this period. [2] I am assuming that all fatal collisions are investigated by the SCIU and that the other 38.1 per cent are accounted for by fatal collisions that do not qualify according to the STATS19 definition (e.g. involving medical episodes, suicides and deaths occurring beyond 30 days from the crash).

If this is not correct and you have more specific data on collision investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), I would be grateful to see that to better understand the SCIU workload.

You offered to take away the question of whether the SCIU should be investigating more of the serious collisions to ensure every opportunity is taken to learn from these terrible events and to avoid future repetition.

I realise that SCIU investigations are resource intensive and are carried out by officers with a deep understanding of the factors contributing to collisions. I appreciate too, that even if the number of serious injury collisions investigated by the SCIU doubled, this would still leave over 90% of serious injury collisions uninvestigated by the SCIU.

Road danger reduction campaigners often raise concern about their perception of victim blaming by some officers who provide STATS19 reports for collisions that are not investigated by the SCIU.

Is it possible to look into the training of officers conducting STATS19 investigations and whether they could receive training from the SCIU to raise awareness of the way that factors like speed can contribute to collisions happening and to ensure more accurate reporting of causes of collisions into STATS19?

Campaigners want to see robust processes to ensure the wider outcomes of STATS19 investigations are incorporated into the work of Transport for London (TfL) delivering Vision Zero.

I would appreciate learning how STATS19 investigations are quality assured and what processes are in place to ensure that what is learned from these MPS investigations is shared as widely as possible? Could you also tell me whether victim level of satisfaction surveys are conducted? If not, could they be?

I also raised the road policing dashboard that my colleague, Assembly Member Berry discussed with the former Commissioner at the London Assembly Plenary meeting in December 2021.[3] Could you provide an update on progress with delivering this dashboard?

Yours sincerely,

Caroline Russell

Green Party Member of the London Assembly