Minnesota Crash Records Audit

In 2016, Minnesota deployed a state-of-the-art electronic crash reporting system to all law enforcement officers across the state. The updated crash report was created with the officer in mind through an extensive usability and design project led by HumanFIRST. Preliminary testing of the new system suggested high user satisfaction but could not determine the extent of the crash data improvement. This study employed a mixed-methods approach to conduct a series of qualitative analyses of the crash data records collected by the legacy crash reporting system and the new MNCrash reporting system. The first analysis compared 360 serious injury and fatal crash reports from 2015 and 2016 and found a year-to-year decrease in mismatching data but a slight increase in missing data. However, overall, the MNCrash system increased the number of data queries, so data access was increased in 2016. The second analysis of serious and fatal injury crashes compared 996 reports sampled from 2015 and 1,572 reports sampled from 2016. The analysis showed a decrease in missing data and a decrease in erroneous data entry in 2016. Finally, the converted 2015 legacy data was analyzed to reveal few errors in the MNCrash conversion process.The authors would like to acknowledge the Minnesota Department of Public Safety for funding and supporting this project