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Police & ForensicsCompleting the police crash report (MV-104P)
You file New York's six-page Police Crash Report, form MV-104P: the crash identification, every person involved, the injuries, the contributing factors, your narrative and your signature, and you send it to the DMV. It follows the DMV instructions for completing and amending form MV-104P.
Free to startScenarios
- A crash with property damage over 1,000 dollars.
- A crash with injured people.
- A crash with three or more units.
- An amended report: the hit and run driver is identified later, or an injured person dies within a year of the crash.
The steps
- Use form MV-104P for every crash with at least one running vehicle, one turned on and ready for transport, or an e-bike or e-scooter; crashes at separate locations each get their own report.
- Enter the crash date and its 4-digit military time; for a damaged parked vehicle, the crash date is the earliest date it was parked, and without a valid date the report cannot be processed.
- Enter the number of units (a tow truck with a vehicle in tow, or a tractor-trailer, counts as one), the number injured without counting the dead, and the number of fatalities, zero if none.
- Check the boxes that apply: suspected serious injury, report taken at the scene, crash reconstructed, left the scene, police photos and repairs over 1,000 dollars; enter the date and time the roadway was cleared.
- Copy the drivers, registrations and insurance exactly from their documents, and code the damage, the diagram and the location.
- Write a full description of the crash in the officer's notes, including everything that cannot be coded elsewhere.
- Enter the name, address and phone number of each witness.
- Fill in the injury grid with every person in or on a unit, injured or not, one line per person, using X for unknown and a dash for does not apply.
- Record the injuries as you determine them at the scene, with no medical diagnosis needed; for a severe bleeding, severe burn, fracture, crush injury, paralysis or severe laceration, check suspected serious injury.
- Enter the airbag deployment code for each occupant.
- Enter at least one apparent contributing factor for the crash, human, vehicular or environmental, and up to two for each unit.
- For a fatality, advise the county coroner and enter the date of death after the person's name.
- Enter your ID number and agency code, sign with your rank and print your name; the reviewing officer enters initials and the date and military time of the review.
- Send the report promptly to the DMV Crash Records Center: the DMV must receive the original.
- For an amended report, check the amended box, repeat the original date, time, drivers, registrations and location exactly as first reported, and describe the changes only in the officer's notes.
To pass
- New York law requires police to investigate a crash with injury reported within five days and report it to the DMV forthwith.
- Drivers must also report a crash with a death, an injury or over 1,000 dollars of damage to any one person on form MV-104 within ten days; not reporting is a misdemeanor.
- A crash is fatal when the death happens within thirty 24-hour periods from the time of the crash.
Official source
New York State DMV · P-33 · form MV-104P
P-33 Police Crash Report Submission Instructions
The New York State DMV publishes its police crash report instructions free: every box of form MV-104P, the amended report and the fatal crash forms.
Making Synapses is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by NHTSA, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, the Albany Police Department or any law enforcement agency. Agency and form names are named only to describe the content.