Yes, you can, why would you think you can’t. Go down to the police station, call the cops and have them come out, call the non-emergency number, whatever and say that your neighbors are being really loud. Give the neighbors address, what time, what their doing, any other info that’s asked of you and you’ve now ‘filed a police report’. You can also decline to give them your personal info (in a case like this, not an accident report) and it would be an anonymous report.
It’s not that you’re the one actually typing it into the computer, putting it into the filing cabinet or telling the officers what to do. Think of it more as making a complaint.
It’s not via the internet.
Why don’t you stop beating around the bush and just tell us what you’re talking about.
I’m not beating around the bush. Adjusters have databases where there can get a ton of information. Why wouldn’t they?
Or they just sue you directly and then you tell your insurer
Yup. They’d send a letter asking for information. If you don’t submit that they’ll treat you as uninsured and go after you that way. At that point people will get their insurance company involved (it’s still much faster to just search a few databases to get the information. They’ll they’ll just file a claim with the other party’s insurance company).
That still means getting a third party involved. Be it the court system, the police or your insurance company. In other words, the random guy on the street can’t figure out who my insurance company is just based on my license plate.
Or in this case, if someone hits my car and won’t give up their information, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t make a claim against their insurance company if they won’t tell me who it is.
I guess I misread/mis-inferred when you said “they’ll just get your license plate and get it via that way” that you meant that someone could just look it up somewhere, similar to how you could find a phone number or address.
When I said “they” I meant the person’s insurance company, sorry if that was unclear. What you would do is fine a claim with your company, give them whatever information you have, and let your company take it from there.
You didn’t cause the damage yet you gave them your insurance info and told them to make a claim?
Why were you so milquetoast about it? I realize we all want to get along with our neighbors, but if you didn’t cause the damage tell them to pound sand. Let them call the police, their lawyer, insurance company, etc… If you didn’t cause the damage make them prove you did. I wouldn’t cooperate any further if I were you.
In a lot of places, you call file a police report online for certain types of incidents. Here is the City of Topeka Police Department, e.g. (Note that they do want you to call them if you have a known suspect or have a lot of damage.) Furthermore, when the weather is bad and they are short-staffed, they go into what they call “phase 3 accident reporting”–that means they won’t even respond to non-injury accidents that aren’t blocking traffic somewhere, so if you need a police report filed, you exchange information with the other driver, and then head on down to police headquarters and fill out the paperwork later. You are not filling it out “as if [you were] a police officer”–you are a citizen filing a report at the station.
In many states, including mine, there is a legal duty to provide insurance information if your car is involved in an accident, whether or not you were at fault or caused the damage. It’s dicier in this case because the OP claims his car wasn’t involved in the first place, but a statement like “the owner of the other vehicle refused to provide insurance information” in the police report is not exactly guaranteed to win friends and influence people.
While there could be 50 different answers, the OP insists he wasn’t involved. Making the neighbor prove their case here is not a black mark against the OP.
I noticed a scratch on my Vette this morning. Will you please supply your car insurance info slash2k so I may bill them for the repair? Don’t give me that “you weren’t involved” nonsense. I demand your insurance info so give it to me.
And if you were my neighbor, or had a photograph of my car adjacent to yours, or had some other remote evidence our vehicles had been in the same block on the same date, I’d give it to you. (In reality, I’m pretty sure I’ve never been in your state, so I owe you no duty under your state’s laws, and you owe me no duty under mine.)
If there was even a remote chance that some hare-brained adjuster working on your behalf could conclude I might possibly have scratched that 'vette, the safest course of action for me is to involve my insurance company as early as possible. Telling you their name and my policy number, and then telling my insurance company to expect a bogus claim from a scam artist, accomplishes that, and it protects me more than leaving you to invent whatever story you want and have your insurance company’s lawyers chasing me.
In the OP’s case, the neighbor knows OP’s name and address, and can provide evidence that both vehicles were in the same block at the same time. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the two cars WERE in a minor accident, just not one that happened the way the neighbor is claiming. (Cf. filmore’s scenario above)
What would OP gain by refusing to reveal the policy number? If the neighbor is demanding the information, that means they are willing to file a bogus claim (or daddy neighbor doesn’t realize it is a bogus claim). In either case, they’re likely willing to file a claim with their own insurance company, providing OP’s name and address, and if the neighbor’s insurance company settles the claim with their insured and then starts pursuing OP via subrogation, it’s not going to get any easier on OP.
It doesn’t appear that the OP received his neighbors insurance info which is what you do even when you have an accident you are at fault in.
OP allowed himself to be bullied. You don’t just hand over your insurance info and receive nothing in return when you didn’t cause the damage. At very least the OP should have also received info and then talked to his insurance rep ASAP, not asking questions from us first.
I’ve been dispatched to things like this. Happens a lot in store parking lots. Person comes out of a store and sees damage on their car door or bumper. Car next/behind it also has damage. If I can’t determine what happened it purely becomes a civil case and both insurance companies duke it out. But in that case both have to give me their insurance info which will go on a report which is publicly available, so they both get each others info anyway.
Handing over your insurance information and saying “go ahead and make a claim” when you know you didn’t cause the damage and you don’t receive their info in exchange is simply not wise.
ETA: YMMV depending on state.
The problem, the way I see it, is if you willingly hand over your info and the other party makes some dinky little claim, say, under $1000 or so. Your insurance company may very well pay it just to be done with it. Now you’ve got a black mark against you, and for what?
Working on the assumption that I didn’t damage their car (for the sake of argument, lets just call that a fact, however their car was damaged, it wasn’t me and they know it). I’m going to make it more difficult for them, as I said earlier, I’d start with ‘then call the cops’, with the hopes that they’d either just drop it OR they back off when they realize that they’d have to file a false police report to get any info from me.
I just can’t see a good reason to hand over any information to some person that randomly says I damaged their car. Let them file a false police report, false insurance claim (with their insurance company) or pony up some money for a lawyer. If it’s a scam, they’ll move to the next target. If they’re mistaken, hopefully the details will exonerate me (and not giving my info might buy some time for that to happen).
When my fellow Michiganders complain about the price of insurance, threads like this make me realize how happy I am that we are a no-fault state.
I’m not clear what you mean. How does no-fault apply if there is a dispute over whether any collision took place at all?
OK. As I said in my post, I understand I can call the police and tell them about a problem I observed. I can make a complaint. My question is different. When a police officer takes some official action-say investigates my complaint, or observes a crime being committed, the officer eventually has to document the incident and describe the officers actions/conclusions. I would call that documentation a “police report”-a police officer making a report for the record. My question is: when a private citizen reports an incident to the police why is that called a “police report”? It seems like what the private citizen does initiates a series of actions that result in a police report. The document and/or information I provide isn’t entered into the police records system by itself. I can’t file the same document the police officer does. So what is the origin of the terminology of what the private citizen does?
It’s understood either way. It’s a police report when you give information to the police, and it’s a police report when the officer types it up. It’s all one process. Most people aren’t that pedantic about it.
You’re responsible for insuring your own car. It doesn’t matter whether or not a collision took place. There would be no incentive to point fingers at the OP and get everyone’s lawyers involved.
Yes he can if he’s willing to pay a few bucks to a commercial service. I wasn’t willing to spend money to test the accuracy, but I put in my plate number and what they offered for free was my make, model and VIN number. I don’t doubt that they could also come up with my name.