By Daniel Bello

As a personal injury attorney, I often work with Spanish-speaking clients who have been seriously injured in car accidents. Seeking compensation for your injuries is confusing, and this confusion is often exacerbated if you’re not proficient in English. 

North Carolina should provide bilingual crash reports to allow Spanish-speaking car accident victims the same access to information and opportunities for justice as English speakers. 

After a car accident, a police officer investigates the crash, speaks to witnesses, and writes everything down in an NC DMV-349 form, commonly called a crash report or police report. Currently, this report is only provided in English in North Carolina, and it is complicated – so complicated that the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has a 126-page instructional manual for officers to use when filling them out.

If you’re hoping to get compensation for your injuries after a car accident, you need to request your crash report and review it for accuracy. Errors or omissions can have a significant impact on your insurance claim. However, many Spanish-speaking victims do not take this step because of the language barrier. 

Insurance companies rely on the crash report to help them decide who was at fault in an accident. In North Carolina, if the insurance company can show that you were even 1% at fault, they can try to deny you any compensation at all. Just a small error on the crash report can easily open the door to that 1%.

Take, for example, the following situation: Someone who had a green light gets into a T-bone collision with someone who was texting while driving and failed to stop at a red light. The insurance company reviews the crash report and seizes on an incorrect note from the responding officer that the victim had enough time to take evasive maneuvers but failed to do so.

This is incorrect. Still, the insurance company has their possible 1 percent, and the victim now faces an uphill battle to get what he’s owed. 

As a Spanish speaker, the victim might not have ever requested the police report. Even if they did, they might not have caught the incorrect notation about failing to take evasive maneuvers. Now, to correct the error, they’ll have to communicate with the responding officer and request a revision. Telling an officer that they’re wrong isn’t easy in English, and it can be even more difficult if you only speak Spanish. 

Meanwhile, while jumping through these hoops, the victim is often out-of-work due to injury and has no car to get to doctors’ appointments.

Equality and equal access to justice shouldn’t be just words on paper. Under Executive Order 13166, which builds on Title VI of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the government has a responsibility to make its services available (“provide meaningful access”) to the populations they serve, regardless of what language those individuals speak. 

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper has declared September 15th-October 15th Hispanic Heritage Month. In last year’s Proclamation to mark the event, Governor Cooper stated that “we must continue working to make North Carolina more just and equitable for all.” In accordance, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) has tasked the Division of Social Services to “take reasonable steps to ensure that people with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have meaningful access to the programs services and information agencies provide.” 

Per U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2022, 10.5 percent of the North Carolina population is of Hispanic or Latino origin, which is a 2.5 percent increase over estimates from 2020. The Migration Policy Institute estimated that as of 2021, there are more than 330,000 people in North Carolina who speak English less than “very well.” 

Other states with significant Spanish-speaking populations, including California and Texas, have made traffic accident reports available in both English and Spanish. 

I call on North Carolina’s Department of Motor Vehicles to provide bilingual crash reports, which will increase access to justice and demonstrate the state’s commitment to serving its diverse population. 

In the meantime, my firm has created a bilingual police report reader for Spanish speakers: https://www.farrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Bilingual_PRreader_8.28.23_WEB.pdf

Daniel Bello is a personal injury attorney at the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin.