Study: Police Reports Miss 96% of Active Phone Use Before Crashes

A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared smartphone telematics with police reports for almost 17,000 crashes in Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. After excluding passive screen activity such as an untouched navigation display, the data still show a huge gap: phones detected active use before crashes far more often than police documented it.

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There Are Some Big Caveats

Phone use before a crash does not automatically make the phone user responsible for the crash.

The researchers didn’t have fault determinations. Someone could be sitting at a red light on a hands-free call and get rammed by a pickup from behind. Activity 29 seconds before impact also tells us a lot less than somebody actively tapping the screen one second before impact.

CMT additionally uses machine learning to estimate whether its user was driving or riding as a passenger. That classification has reportedly exceeded 96 percent accuracy, which is impressive, but leaves some room for error.

So I would not take these numbers and proclaim that 751 crashes were “caused by phones.” The study doesn’t support that. What the study does support, very strongly, is that active phone use immediately before crashes happens a hell of a lot more often than police reports manage to capture.