REGINA – It’s one of the worst ways to start the day: finding out your car had been hit overnight. These incidents have spiked since the summer.
Statistics show that 132 hit-and-run reports have been filed in the past 12 weeks. That’s up 28 reports compared to a 12-week span during the summer (June 1 – Aug. 21).
Regina Police spokesperson, Elizabeth Popowich, says hit-and-run incidents fluctuate by the year, and have actually gone down compared to the same numbers this time last year.
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The numbers aren’t necessarily too alarming – “A door dent, a scrape, something like that could technically be a hit-and-run,” said Popowich – but there still are severe cases. And for people with basic SGI coverage, that means paying a deductible as high as $700.
“It is just one of those unfortunate situations where you feel like, ‘Well, this isn’t fair, you know’,” said Kelley Brinkworth, manager of media relations at SGI.
She says the proper thing to do is report the hit-and-run to the police.
“Down the road, if let’s say police are able to find out who hit your vehicle, then SGI would try to recover the money from that person, from the responsible party, and then you would get that deductible money back,” said Brinkworth.
Failing to stop at the scene of an accident can result in up to 5 years in prison.