Why do people flee the scene of accidents?

09 January 2025

All it takes is a lapse of attention, a momentary distraction – and the result is an accident. A road accident takes place somewhere in Germany about every twelve seconds. Many of those involved then flee the scene. Why our own mind sometimes leads us to make the wrong decision.

In moral terms, it’s as clear as day: if you break something or injure someone, then you take responsibility. This is also reflected in the law: For instance, it’s a criminal offence to leave the scene after a car accident. The penalties can include a fine, up to three years in prison, a driving ban and the loss of your driving licence. Nonetheless, fleeing the scene of an accident is a mass phenomenon, mainly but not exclusively in the case of damage to property.

In Berlin for example, some 32,000 people ran away from the scene of an accident in 2022. In other words, the perpetrator absconded in a quarter of the recorded 130,000 cases. Across Germany in the same period, according to figures released by the police services of the individual states, 544,646 of the people involved in accidents absconded. In the case of accidents in which people lost their lives or were injured or major damage resulted, the German Statistical Office reports that 40,659 people fled the scene – eleven percent of the total. In other words, every ninth perpetrator ran away rather than face the consequences.

Surveys carried out in the US yield similar rates. For example, in Boston between 2009 and 2012, the responsible party in collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles absconded in six percent of the cases. In the case of accidents which led to the deaths of pedestrians, that figure was as high as 18 to 20 percent of the drivers.

According to American studies, perpetrators are more likely to flee at night and at the weekend. Also more likely to abscond are those, disproportionately young men, who have been drink-driving or driving without a licence.

On the other hand, perpetrators are less likely to flee if the victim is a child or an old person. In other words, the way a person behaves after an accident appears to depend on various factors, some of which contradict one another. A perpetrator’s conscience will apparently intervene more readily if the victim appears particularly vulnerable or helpless. At night or at the weekend, there is a greater chance that people will drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. And in the dark, they seem to believe they will be able to steal away unnoticed.

But that is all too often proved wrong in practice. In Germany, some 40 percent of absconders are caught, more in cases involving death or injury. By its own account, the Bavarian police service successfully prosecutes 80 percent of all perpetrators who flee a scene where serious injury has been inflicted. However, this statistic includes all those people who notify the police later or give themselves up voluntarily.

This is because running away is often an involuntary reaction: stress hormones like adrenaline flood the body, triggering an instinctive flight response. As a British study of 52 people convicted of hit-and-run offences showed, this kind of panic reaction is one of the most common causes of abscondment. Most of them claimed to have acted in self-protection – either in panic mode or to avoid possible criminal prosecution.

Others maintained that they either didn’t notice the accident or thought it was only a minor incident that did not need reporting. Many convicted offenders in Belgium said much the same thing. Belgium’s road safety institute surveyed 853 of them, most of whom were men under the age of 25.

In 42 percent of the cases, the absconder was either drunk or had been taking drugs. As traffic psychologist Ludo Kluppels explains, this makes it harder to make rational decisions. Especially in the first few seconds after the accident, in which the dominant emotions are fear, shame and guilt. Although most people have the kind of self-control needed to act responsibly, some do not.

“There’s a small group who make bad decisions based not on an overwhelming flood of emotions but on a lack of emotion,” Mr Kluppels says. They don’t have a moral compass; they aren’t interested in other people, rules or laws but only in their own interest in avoiding punishment. A lack of awareness of responsibility and of empathy is a particular characteristic of people with what is known as a dissocial or antisocial personality disorder, a condition which affects three in every hundred men and one in every hundred women.

The vast majority of people are not wired like this, in other words. They may well in general share the strong urge as far as possible to avoid unpleasant experiences but will generally resist the impulse because they don’t want to be bad people and running away from the scene would be a violation of the law, social norms and their moral values. “But if they do the wrong thing, what you end up with is a cognitive dissonance between their idea of themselves and reality,” explains Ralf Buchstaller from TÜV NORD’s Medical-Psychological Institute in Hamburg. “To resolve this contradiction, they grasp after excuses or justifications,” the psychologist says. The most frequently used excuse among absconders in Belgium: I thought it was an animal.

As a means to avoid succumbing to panic in the extreme situation of an accident, in an interview with Saarland’s TV broadcaster traffic psychologist Moritz Decke recommends a simple breathing technique: keep counting up to four and breathe in or out each time you get to four. This regular breathing rhythm will calm the whole body. You’ll then be able to act in a more considered, rational and empathic way – to help rather than running away.

By the way, if you bump into a neighbouring car when manoeuvring out of a parking space, leaving a note under the windscreen wiper with your name and phone number is not good enough. As TÜV NORD psychologist Mr Buchstaller explains, this too is considered fleeing the scene – a crime, in other words.

From the point of view of the working group of the German Council on Jurisdiction in Traffic, this should also remain the case in the future. But in early 2024, the specialists recommended reforming the paragraph on hit-and-run accidents: their recommendations included setting a specific minimum waiting time and setting up as central reporting point. And the experts have also suggested another change. The delayed reporting of an accident to the police currently only serves to reduce the severity of the penalty, and that only in cases of damage to property. From the point of view of the specialists, people should in future have the option to report all types of accident retrospectively within 24 hours without fear of prosecution. This would be an option for anyone who initially succumbs to panic but very quickly regrets their course of action.