NYPD Unit Draws Scrutiny for Its Handling of Crashes Involving Pedestrians

The crash happened before his eyes, but for Jacob Stevens all that remains is the sound: the wrenching noise of the Honda sedan as it slammed into his wife, Clara Heyworth, while she walked to meet him across a Brooklyn street last July.

The police responded to the scene and the driver of the Honda was arrested. But Mr. Stevens said an investigation by accident squad detectives, initiated shortly after the early-morning crash on July 10, was halted because his wife was still alive at the time. The unit did not begin a formal investigation into the crash until July 14, three days after Ms. Heyworth, 28, died from her injuries.

That delay, Mr. Stevens said, meant that most of the evidence from the crash — skid marks and surveillance video, witness accounts, and alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream — had been lost.

“I was horrified that they called off the investigation that night,” he said.

Mr. Stevens plans to file suit in United States District Court in Brooklyn on Monday against the driver of the car, and against the New York Police Department for not fully investigating the crash, in what his complaint describes as a “systematic failure” of police policy.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the department over its handling of crashes involving cars striking pedestrians and cyclists, an issue that threatens a proud accomplishment of the Bloomberg years: safer streets.

It seeks to draw scrutiny to the important role played by a small unit of traffic crime investigators, a division of the Highway Patrol known as the Accident Investigations Squad, or A.I.S.

The unit is already facing criticism and legal challenge over its handling of a crash that killed a Canadian bicyclist, Mathieu Lefevre, in Brooklyn last year.

These specially trained detectives — fewer than two dozen — do the forensic work of measuring skid marks, reviewing closed-circuit video recordings and diagraming crash sites. But they do so only in cases of death or when a victim is deemed likely to die.

It is an approach that makes the most of shrinking resources, police officials told a City Council hearing in February, but one that critics contend leaves thousands of injured pedestrians with little more than a simple write-up of their accidents.

It also puts a burden on emergency room staff members, who may be unaware that their split-second call about a patient’s prognosis could dictate how much, if any, police resources are given to a case.

At the Council hearing in February, John T. Cassidy, the police deputy chief in charge of transportation, acknowledged that the accident investigation squad would not respond “if there is not ‘a likely to die,’ or a death.”

The complaint says the department’s policy is a direct violation of state traffic law, which calls for investigations of all crashes that cause serious injury, whether or not anyone is killed

The police unit conducted 304 investigations last year, the police said, a year in which the city recorded 243 people killed in traffic crashes, including Ms. Heyworth and 138 other pedestrians, and 22 bicyclists.

Those statistics have declined in the last decade as the Transportation Department has taken steps to redesign streets, slow car speeds and, most recently, install 1,800 countdown clocks at crosswalks.

But few of the crashes have resulted in arrests or criminal charges unless the driver was drunk or distracted by a cellphone. That is an indication, critics contend, that the police treat traffic deaths less seriously than other violence, even as cars now kill more New Yorkers than guns.