How to make sure that my book is "accurate"

Question

I'm not exactly writing historical fiction or realistic, but I want my story to be "accurate."

For example, let's say that my character got into a car crash after being chased by the police. He gets severe injuries and the police arrests him. This never happened personally to me, or was a event in the story.

But in real life, I don't know what the police would actually do handling a criminal with severe injuries.

At the same time, searching things like that on Google can be hard to find helpful results.

Is there a person that specifically helps you with situations like this in writing? How am I supposed to fact check scenes like this?

Answer 1

Research is how you find out what you do not know.
Look at the acknowledgements in many books and see that they use experts to help when google is not enough.

You use experts who do know to guide you when you need more research info than google gives you.

You could try paramedics to see what they do with an accident victim after the police call for help. You could try asking police about how they handle such situations. There will be some overlap and some that is different which each would know better.

You could ask a reference librarian to help you research. There is so much more resources than google provides access to easily.

Answer 2

You'd be very surprised what things people will tell you when you ask a question and say "it's for a book." As a general rule, a polite phone call to your local police office to ask about the procedure they would use in this scenario. Heck, read them the story you wrote up to and including the crash and have them walk through the scenario (I was talking with someone about the Mythbusters episode reguarding Christmas Tree fires and explained they did the tree burn test at the Fire Department training facility because fire fighters do train for this specific type of fire and probably said "You bring a tree down here and light it, we'll have a crew to put it out for free).

From my own experience as a first responder, generally, Police would first secure the scene to make sure the person they were chasing was no longer a threat while calling in an ambulance to "stage" somewhere. This would mean having the ambulance park with engines on ready to go once the scene is deemed safe. One of the first rules of first responders is to never enter a scene that is still unsafe to you... it's only going to make one more body. As a Life Guard, I would frequently work at pools where I was the only one on duty. In some scenarioes I thankfully never had to use beyond practice, procedure was to call 911 prior to fishing out a drowning victim. Once I start the recovery I cannot stop, even to call 911 mid-recovery procedures.