The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says police officers are missing the single biggest clue at most crash scenes: the phone in the driver's hand. A new study out August 27, 2026 puts a number on that blind spot.

 

IIHS researchers matched anonymized telematics data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics against nearly 17,000 police-reported crashes in four states between 2021 and 2024. What they found undercuts how the country tracks distracted driving.

Telematics from safe-driving apps showed drivers were on their phones in 7% of single-vehicle crashes and 8% of two-vehicle crashes in the 30 seconds before impact. Police paperwork caught cellphone use in less than 1% of those same wrecks, a gap IIHS pegs at a factor of at least seven.