Car Accident Lawyer in Inglewood

What do Inglewood’s crash figures show for car accidents?

In the California Office of Traffic Safety rankings for 2023, where rank 1 is the worst in the group, Inglewood ranked 5th of 62 California cities its size for total people killed and injured in traffic collisions, with 634 victims. Three of its individual rankings are harder still. Nighttime collisions, which the Office of Traffic Safety counts between 9:00pm and 2:59am, ranked 1st of 62, meaning the worst of every city in its population group, with 80 such collisions. Hit and run ranked 2nd worst of 62 with 84 collisions. Speed-related collisions ranked 3rd worst of 62 with 105. Against all that, alcohol-involved victims ranked 58th of 62, which is near the best in the group, with 23 victims. These rankings are rate based, adjusted for population and daily vehicle miles travelled, so they say Inglewood is worse than comparable cities, not that it has the highest raw counts in California.

Read together, those figures describe a particular problem rather than a general one. Inglewood’s difficulty is fast, dark and fleeing, and it is not drink. A collision after 9:00pm has fewer independent witnesses, worse sight lines, and a dispute waiting about lighting and signal phasing. A speed-related collision produces injuries out of proportion to the damage a photograph suggests, and the speed itself then becomes the main argument over fault shares. And in a city ranked 2nd worst of 62 its size for hit and run, the driver may never be identified, which moves the claim onto your own uninsured motorist coverage rather than ending it.

Collisions inside Inglewood city limits are investigated by the Inglewood Police Department, and the collision report sits with its records unit. This page does not print a fee or a counter procedure for it, because the Department’s current records instructions could not be confirmed from a primary source, so ask the records unit for the current method and cost. Collisions on Interstate 405 or Interstate 105 are normally California Highway Patrol matters instead, which changes who holds the report and whether the roadway is in state rather than city hands. Which agency owns a particular Inglewood surface street is worth establishing early, because it decides who the defendant is if the road itself contributed.

Where is an Inglewood car accident case filed, and what are the deadlines?

California is a pure comparative fault state, so a share of the blame reduces what you recover and does not end the claim. That matters here, because a fast night-time collision is the pattern in which an adjuster assigns a high percentage in the first week, before anybody has examined the evidence. The deadline depends on the defendant. Against another driver it is generally two years from the date of injury under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1. Against a public entity, Government Code section 911.2 requires a written claim within six months, and the shorter deadline governs. A claim against the City of Inglewood is presented to the City Clerk’s Office at City Hall, One W. Manchester Boulevard, Inglewood, CA 90301. A Metro claim goes instead to LACMTA Legal Services, which accepts claim forms only in person or by post. An unlimited civil injury or wrongful death case arising here is filed in the Southwest District, because Los Angeles Superior Court Local Rule 2.3(a)(1)(A) requires it to be filed in the judicial district where the incident arose. That district has two civil courthouses, the Inglewood Courthouse at One Regent Street and the Torrance Courthouse at 825 Maple Avenue.

More on local practice on the Inglewood personal injury page, and on the law itself on the Los Angeles car accident page. The other collision types with Inglewood’s own published figures: pedestrian accidents, bicycle accidents and motorcycle accidents. Mass tort claims are taken on for Inglewood residents as well, and those are set out on the mass torts page.