Fatal road traffic incident involving a police van - South Yorkshire Police, December 2018

On 9 December 2018 a member of the public drove their car the wrong way around a roundabout in Doncaster and collided with a South Yorkshire Police (SYP) van containing three officers. The driver of the car suffered serious head and leg injuries and was pronounced dead later the same evening. Officers in the police van sustained light injuries.

Our investigators attended the scene of the incident. They obtained statements from the occupants of the police vehicle involved in the collision and members of the public, as well as CCTV from the local authority and footage from the police van involved. All SYP officers co-operated fully with our investigation.

The evidence gathered during the course of this investigation suggests that the driver may have lost control of their vehicle. CCTV evidence, an independent witness account and the statements from the officers in the police van all confirm that the car accelerated and entered the roundabout on the wrong side of the road, crashing into the police van after narrowly missing a number of other vehicles. The speed of the police van was low and footage recovered from the scene suggests there were no other vehicles involved that may have affected the way this incident unfolded.

Based on the evidence available we found no indication that any person serving with the police may have behaved in a manner that would justify the bringing of disciplinary proceedings, or had committed a criminal offence.

We completed our investigation in February 2019 but waited until the inquest into the driver’s death had concluded, in summer 2019, to publish its outcomes.