Savannah-Chatham police were called to nearly 2,400 hit-and-runs in 2013.
Many of those crashes were fender-benders in parking lots or on the side of the road, said Lt. Gregory Mitchell, who oversees the department’s traffic unit. It’s something that happens all over.
“They seem to occur equally both in the city and in the county jurisdiction,” Mitchell said. “It’s not like it’s localized in the more populated area. Even out in the unincorporated areas of the county, you still have people that will run into cars and leave.”
Of the 2,383 hit-and-runs in Savannah and unincorporated Chatham County last year, about 900 weren’t open-and-shut and were forwarded by supervising patrol officers to the traffic unit’s detectives. Seventy-one of those cases involved injuries.
Of the hit-and-run cases opened by the traffic unit last year, 120 resulted in criminal charges being filed. Many were closed as civil matters, resulted in citations being issued, a few are still open, and others were closed due to lack of evidence.
Investigators see several factors involved in hit-and-run cases.
“Generally, our main goal is prevention,” Mitchell said. “It’s a difficult thing to prevent because you never know when someone will run into someone’s car and just flee just because either they’re scared, they’re not insured, or they just don’t know what to do.”
Motorists who hit other people’s cars and drive away do so for a variety of reasons, Mitchell said.
Police have found in many cases that hit-and-run motorists aren’t driving their own cars. In other instances, a driver who flees the scene may be trying to avoid contact with police for reasons such as being inebriated, not having a valid license or even having a warrant out for his or her arrest.
Age, too, is often a factor in the high number of hit-and-run, cases, Mitchell said.
“We’ve experienced a lot of younger drivers who were just basically that — they are inexperienced, immature,” he said. “An accident will happen, something minor, even many times they have insurance and they still leave the scene. They don’t want their parents to know or they don’t want to have contact with the police, or it’s just really crazy.”
It’s not just the county’s younger drivers who are sometimes prone to leave the scene of an accident. There’s also an increase in hit-and-run cases with significantly older drivers, he said, although the circumstances often tend to be different.
“You have older drivers that just because of age and sometimes loss of some physical skills and many times some cognitive skills, they bump a car in the parking lot and maybe not even realize it or just drive away and not leave the information on the windshield and not try to contact someone,” Mitchell said.
Many cases, such as those that involve minor damage to cars, wind up getting closed as civil matters and worked out with the parties’ insurance providers. Situations that involve significant damage to a vehicle or, worse, an individual, are handled as criminal matters.
“Leaving the scene of an accident with injuries is a serious offense,” Mitchell said. “We definitely place charges against an individual in cases like that.”
Sometimes hit-and-runs aren’t as cut and dry as someone driving into another car and then taking off. When looking into a person’s driving record during an investigation, traffic unit detectives also look for criminal history.
“Sometimes people fake automobile accidents just to collect insurance money,” Mitchell said. “We’ll make sure that’s not an issue — making these false claims affects all consumers because it costs more. Insurance companies pass that cost along to a consumer.”
Occasionally, he said, investigators will discover that a suspect in a hit-and-run is wanted in connection with another case within the department. In such instances, traffic unit detectives pass along that information to investigators working the other criminal cases.
Not all hit-and-runs can be solved. The primary reason for that, Mitchell said, is a lack of information. In some instances, people may not realize their vehicle has been struck for several days. Other times, investigators are faced with a lack of witnesses, and even street cameras don’t always catch offending drivers’ cars at an angle that allows tag numbers to be gleaned.
“Sometimes, you just can’t figure out who was driving the car at the time of the accident even though you identified the tag number,” Mitchell said. “You may not get cooperation from the owner and there are no witnesses.”
Mitchell said that if someone is the victim of a hit-and-run, and they’re not hurt, the best thing he or she can do to help police solve the case is to get a description of the driver.
Remembering what the driver looked like is especially important since the driver might not own the car. It’s a bad idea to chase after the runaway driver, he said, because they could be fleeing from the law for reasons other than just an accident.
“We’re in this modern era when every phone has a camera — take a photo, turn on the video, whatever your mobile device has and see if you can get a picture,” he said. “There’s that old saying a picture’s worth a thousand words. And get a photo of the driver and the vehicle if at all possible.”
METRO’S TRAFFIC UNIT
The Savannah-Chatham police department’s traffic unit falls under the broader special operations division and has three primary components that work together.
• Traffic enforcement is the most visible. This arm runs radar and conducts statistics-based strategic enforcement programs, such as monitoring intersections with high accident volume and responding to residents’ complaints about speeding.
• Hit-and-run investigators follow up on cases patrol supervisors send up.
• The Major Accident Investigation Team responds to wrecks that involve serious injuries or fatalities, working in tandem with forensics. This team establishes what led to the crashes and which charges, when necessary, are filed.
All officers are utilized to provide additional resources to other areas of the department as needed, and members of the traffic unit function as motorcycle escorts during parades, funerals and other events.
GARDEN CITY POLICE SEEK HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER
Garden City police are asking the public to help them locate a woman wanted for a hit-and-run wreck that hospitalized a pedestrian Tuesday night.
The victim was struck about 10:45 p.m. in the 5000 block of Ogeechee Road and suffered head trauma, said Garden City police Capt. Gil Ballard. She was transported to Memorial University Medical Center and was in stable condition Wednesday.
Ballard said the female driver initially stopped after hitting the woman but then fled the scene traveling southbound toward Dean Forest Road.
She was driving a gray passenger car that will have front end damage after the wreck.
Ballard asked anyone who may have witnessed the crash, or who has information about the driver’s identity to contact Garden City police at 912-966-7777. Ballard also asked that anyone aware of such a vehicle brought in for repairs consistent with the type of wreck that occurred Tuesday notify police.
—Corey Dickstein