Police Reports by State: How to Get a Copy, What They Cost, and What's Public

A police report is not one document. "Crash report" and "incident report" are two entirely separate products in almost every state, held by different agencies, released under different rules, and priced differently, and most confusion about how to get a copy traces back to not knowing which one you actually need.

This guide covers both channels, the federal privacy layer that decides who gets a full copy versus a redacted one, what a report typically costs, and a state-by-state table with the real crash-report channel, the incident-report law, and the bodycam statute (or its honest absence) for all 50 states and DC.

Information last verified on 2026-08-11. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

Crash Report or Incident Report: Two Different Channels

Every state researched for this guide, Texas, Florida, California, and New York among them, runs crash reports through a separate administrative channel from incident or offense reports. A crash report usually comes from a state Department of Transportation, Department of Motor Vehicles, or Department of Public Safety, sometimes through a private vendor the agency has authorized, most commonly LexisNexis's BuyCrash platform. An incident report, covering an arrest, a burglary, an assault, or any non-crash police response, comes from the specific local department that responded, released under the state's general public-records or open-records act rather than a crash-specific statute.

This split shows up even inside a single state. New York's crash-report copy comes from the DMV once the report is processed, through the online Order Crash Reports Online portal or by mailing form MV-198C, while a crash on the Thruway system uses an entirely separate form, TA-W4310, sent to the Thruway Authority instead of DMV. An incident report from an NYPD precinct is a third, unrelated channel. Confusing these three is the single most common way a request goes nowhere: mailing a Thruway crash form to DMV, or looking for an arrest report on a crash-report portal, gets a dead end even though the information exists somewhere in the system.

Many states also route crash reports through LexisNexis's BuyCrash, agency-white-labeled software that lets a police department post its own crash reports for 24/7 online purchase. BuyCrash is not a data-broker lookup site. Each agency's storefront serves only that agency's own reports, the same official-distribution role a state's own portal plays; Indiana, Georgia, and many Connecticut and Maryland jurisdictions route through it. A town or county that lists BuyCrash on its own .gov page is treating it as the official channel, not outsourcing to a third party.

Getting a Copy: Where the Two Intents Diverge

Someone searching for "how to get a police report" is usually one of two different readers. The first wants a copy of a report that already exists, most often after a crash, to give to an insurer or an attorney. The second wants to report something that just happened, a theft, a hit-and-run, harassment, and needs to know how to file in the first place. Search demand for filing ("how to file a police report," roughly 9,900 searches a month) actually outweighs demand for obtaining a copy of an existing report ("how to get a police report," roughly 3,600 a month), and the two audiences want completely different pages.

If you need to file a new report, see How to File a Police Report for the 911-versus-non-emergency-line decision, online reporting thresholds, and what filing does and does not accomplish. If you already have a report number and need to make sense of what the document actually says, codes, narrative sections, the diagram, see How to Read a Police Report. If what you actually want is bodycam or dashcam video rather than the written report, that is a separate legal framework covered in How to Request Body Cam Footage. And if the underlying question is simply whether any of this is public in the first place, see Are Police Reports Public?

What a Police Report Costs

Fees vary by state and by report type, and no single number is typical. Confirmed figures from official state sources cluster in the $4 to $25 range for a standard crash report: Missouri and Illinois's ISP E-Pay both charge $5 to $6, Idaho's Transportation Department portal charges $7, Texas's CRIS charges $6 for a standard copy and $8 certified, Florida's Crash Portal charges $10 plus a $2 online convenience fee, and New Jersey tiers from $5 for a Turnpike report to $20 for a serious-injury or fatal investigation file. Real outliers exist on both ends: North Dakota's online portal charges $7, while West Virginia charges $20 standard and $25 for a certified copy, and Delaware charges $25 for a standard collision report but $60 for a fatal one. California's CHP prices by page count rather than a flat fee, from $10 for 1 to 25 pages up to $40-plus for longer reports.

Incident reports (non-crash) are usually priced per page rather than a flat fee, and several states waive the fee entirely for the person the report is about; Washington, D.C.'s PD-251 incident report currently has its production fee temporarily waived, and Mississippi's incident reports are treated as public records with no fee structure comparable to a crash-report portal. A report obtained free of charge from the responding agency directly is common; a paid vendor portal exists mainly for the convenience of not having to go through the department in person.

Who Gets a Full Copy vs. a Redacted One: The Federal Layer

Two different federal statutes are relevant here, and only one of them actually restricts access to a crash report.

The Driver's Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2721, bars a state DMV from "knowingly disclos[ing] or otherwise mak[ing] available" personal information from a motor vehicle record except under one of the statute's listed permitted uses: law enforcement, insurance investigation and underwriting, litigation, licensed private investigative work, and several others, plus the record subject's own consent. This is the mechanism behind why a crash report handed to a non-party often comes back with names, addresses, and license numbers stripped out while the same report goes unredacted to an involved party or their insurer. Texas Transportation Code § 550.065(c-1) illustrates the pattern directly: any person can get a redacted crash report stripping personal identifiers, while the full unredacted version is reserved for parties, insurers, and their representatives.

A second statute is frequently cited for the wrong reason. 23 U.S.C. § 407, renumbered from the commonly cited § 409, is a narrow litigation-discovery privilege. It shields hazard-identification and safety-planning data, a state's internal survey of its most dangerous intersections, compiled specifically for federal-aid highway safety programs, from being used as evidence that the state had prior notice of a dangerous condition. It has nothing to do with whether the crash report documenting what happened in your specific collision can be withheld from you. A page or agency response that cites "§ 409" or "§ 407" as a reason your own crash report can be denied is misapplying the statute; its scope is federal hazard-planning data, not the report itself.

For records held by a federal agency rather than a state DMV or local police department, the FBI or a federal task force, for example, access runs through the federal Freedom of Information Act instead, and its law-enforcement exemption at 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7) permits withholding only to the extent release would cause one of six specific harms: interference with an enforcement proceeding, denial of a fair trial, an unwarranted privacy invasion, exposure of a confidential source, exposure of investigative techniques, or endangerment of someone's safety. Each is a case-by-case balancing test, not a blanket bar, and it is the exception rather than the rule for the ordinary reader; most crash and incident reports never touch a federal agency at all.

The 1-in-6 States Where Crash Reports Are Not Confidential

Most states, following the pattern set by Texas, Florida, and California, start from a rule that a crash report is confidential by default and release it only to a defined list of eligible requesters. A meaningful minority of states run the opposite direction, and a national guide that assumes confidentiality-by-default is universal will be wrong for these readers.

Nevada is the clearest inversion: a police-filed crash report under NRS 484E.110 is explicitly not privileged or confidential, while the driver's own self-filed report to the DMV under NRS 484E.070 runs the opposite way and stays confidential. New Jersey's N.J.S.A. 39:4-131 makes police-prepared crash reports open by statute, which is why its NJSP Crash Report Portal requires no eligibility check for a basic report. Indiana Code § 9-26-2-3 states outright that "a police-filed accident report is not a confidential record." South Dakota (SDCL § 32-34-13), North Dakota (N.D.C.C. § 39-08-13), and New York (Public Officers Law § 66-a, reports "open to the inspection of any person having an interest therein") each run the same direction. If your state is one of these six, do not expect the sworn-statement or eligibility-list friction that governs most of the country; check that state's own page in the table below for its specific process.

Incident Reports and the Investigative-File Exemption

An incident or offense report runs through a different rule entirely: the state's general public-records law and its law-enforcement or investigatory-records exemption. Every state independently checked for this guide, New York's Public Officers Law § 87(2)(e), Ohio's R.C. § 149.43, and Illinois's 5 ILCS 140/7, draws the same basic line: a record compiled for law enforcement purposes can be withheld only to the extent disclosure would cause a specific, identifiable harm, interference with an active investigation, exposure of a confidential source, a fair-trial risk, not simply because the record "relates to" law enforcement generally. Arizona is the one state in this research with no codified law-enforcement exemption at all; withholding there runs entirely on case law (Cox Arizona Publications v. Collins and the Scottsdale Unified School District balancing test).

An incident report is also a different document from a bodycam recording, a 911 call, or a court case file, even when all four relate to the same event. See Are 911 Calls Public Records? for that adjacent record type, held by dispatch rather than the responding officer in most jurisdictions.

Bodycam Footage: A Third, Separate Legal Question

Bodycam access is governed by a completely different statute (or, in about a quarter of states, no statute at all) than either report type above. Three structural patterns show up across the country: a standalone dedicated bodycam act (Illinois's 50 ILCS 706/10-20, New Jersey's N.J.S.A. 40A:14-118.5, Minnesota's § 13.825), the rule embedded as a subsection of the general law-enforcement exemption (Ohio's § 149.43, Washington's RCW 42.56.240(14), Oklahoma's 51 O.S. § 24A.8), or genuine statutory absence, where footage is governed only by agency policy or the general exemption (roughly 13 states, including Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and West Virginia). Indiana's IC 5-14-3-4(b)(1) is worth knowing as a model for how differently this can be drawn: it states outright that "a law enforcement recording is not an investigatory record," routing bodycam access out of the general exemption entirely and into its own dedicated inspection statute.

The full request process, state-by-state model comparison, and the specific windows and traps (Pennsylvania's separate Act 22 statute, California's SB 1421 critical-incident categories, Oklahoma's 10-day post-arraignment release trigger) live on the dedicated spoke: How to Request Body Cam Footage. For the underlying law in a specific state, mandate status, retention schedules, and case law, see that state's page on Police Bodycam Laws.

Corrections: A Report Is Never Silently Edited

Where a correction process is documented, it follows the same shape everywhere it was found: a supplement or addendum, never a silent rewrite. Texas Transportation Code § 550.068 states this directly, a change to a collision report "may be made only by the peace officer who prepared the report," and a non-officer's correction request results in "a written supplement to the report" that clearly identifies who originated the change, with the original report left intact. Expect this same addendum model as the general rule in any state, even where no formal correction statute was located; the responding agency's records unit is the starting point.

Police Reports by State

The table below lists, for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the real crash-report channel, the incident-report law, and the bodycam statute (or its documented absence) currently in effect. Each state name links to a full page covering exact fees, eligibility, timelines, and the state's own bodycam framework.

Scams to Watch For

A documented pattern worth flagging before you search: scammers call recent crash victims claiming the other driver's insurer has "assumed complete responsibility" and direct the victim to a third-party site to "retrieve" their report. The sites work because they pull real data lifted from the state's own crash report system, not because the caller has independent knowledge. A Texas department that tracked this scam put it plainly: request your report through the official state or court portal, never a link received by text or an unsolicited call, since these calls never originate from law enforcement.

Disclaimer

This article provides general information about how police crash reports, incident reports, and body camera footage are requested across the United States. It is not legal advice. Fees, portals, and statutes change; confirm current details with the relevant state agency, local department, or a licensed attorney before relying on anything here for a specific situation.

---

Last updated: 2026-08-11. Fees and portals reflect their published status as of August 2026.