CRaSH Collision Recording and sharing system. This is a centralised system used by some police forces to record road traffic collisions
COPA Case Overview Preparation Application. This is a system used by the Metropolitan Police Service to record road traffic collisions
CRaSH enables police officers to capture and upload collision data from the roadside in real time: this delivers time saving and helps improve road safety by providing a more accurate view of when and where accidents occur. Currently 30 police forces in England Wales and Scotland use or have used CRaSH and the Metropolitan Police Service have adopted COPA. Both CRaSH and COPA are ‘injury-based severity’ reporting systems where the officer records the most severe injury for the casualty. These injuries are then automatically converted to a severity level from ‘slight’ to ‘serious’. Because this eliminates the uncertainty in determining severity that arises from the officer having to make their own judgement, this system is expected to be more accurate.
In response to this, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Methodology Advisory Service developed a methodology to quantify the effect of the introduction of injury-based reporting systems (CRaSH and COPA) on the number of slight and serious injuries reported to the police and to estimate the level of slight and serious injuries as if all police forces were using those systems
For more detail on this please refer to the useful guide on Severity adjustments which the Department for Transport have published. The link can be found at the bottom of this article.