WTNH
1 of 5 so far this year: Chapel-Temple scene March 18 where truck driver killed Maria Luisa Morales.
Isaac Yu Photo
Cops at first day of crash-investigation training.
The top of a vehicle’s hood is 42 inches above the ground, and its bumper is 33 inches above the ground. If the bumper’s leading edge juts out by 5 inches, what is the vehicle’s lean angle?
Cops from around Connecticut, including three city officers, gathered at New Haven police’s training academy to solve accident reconstruction problems like that one, diving into trigonometry.
For five days this week, retired Officer Dale Farmer of SSR Training is teaching a course at the academy at at 710 Sherman Parkway on accident reconstruction, with a focus on pedestrian and cyclist collisions. The training comes after a national rise in motor deaths last year.
So far in 2021, NHPD reports that 46 pedestrians and eight cyclists have been struck, with five pedestrian deaths.
“These are complex” investigations, noted Lt. Stephan Torquati, who supervises the department’s patrol division. “We want our officers to have the best tools possible to solve them.”
Picking up their pencils and calculators, officers faced with the above math question Monday used an inverse tangent formula to find the lean angle: 60.94 degrees. That angle, Farmer explained, is crucial to determining how much of the vehicle’s speed was transferred to the victim.
A wedge car, for example, impacts the lower body and produces more rotational force. Meanwhile, a car with a boxier shape might result in injuries spread out across the body. Quick calculations of the lean angle could therefore allow officers to relay important information to trauma surgeons.
Dale Farmer at the academy Monday.
Farmer will also lead the class through complex speed transfer equations, rotational acceleration formulas, and friction calculations. This math was core to his 32-year career as an officer, most recently on the traffic unit in Kingsfort, Tennessee. Now he shares the same skills with police forces across New England.
The course is not for the faint of heart. Students analyzed photos of gruesome accidents, using blood and bruises to reconstruct a clear picture of what happened. While watching a crash dummy being hit at 40 miles an hour, NHPD Officer Maegan Moran recalled a scene where the vehicle had been traveling at 80 miles an hour.
Collisions at that speed usually result in amputation, Farmer said grimly.
Meriden Officers Johnson, Golden, Giambrone, and Vazquez.
Officers hitting the books this week came from Meriden, Stratford, as far as Providence. Officer John Johnson from Meriden, pictured above with three of his colleagues, has been in Farmer’s classroom for nearly six weeks. When asked whether the course will be useful, he responded “100 percent.”
“This class is definitely very saturated with info, and very math-heavy. It’s a completely different arena from what we already know,” Johnson said. “But we’ll know how to reverse engineer things, and use this data to process an accident and figure out impact speeds.”
Officer John Moore: Adding to the investigatory toolkit.
Also among the class of 32 pupils were three New Haven officers active on the reconstruction team, including Officer John Moore. The department decided to host the pedestrian-focused course after taking a series of accident reconstruction classes with Farmer earlier this year.
“A majority of our crashes are pedestrian related,” Moore said. “So for us, it was paramount that we had this training here and host these guys. This helps us lock in and get more information at the scene.”
There are no such things as "accidents": only the outcomes of our automotive-prioritized landscape, and the results of not taking due care behind the wheel. This seems like good knowledge to be trained on, as more automakers are designing vehicles with massive, flat, and boxy front ends so they can get more profit and appeal to consumers who have a need to compensate for something. As "light truck" (apparently light means 6000 pounds now) hoods are now approaching 6 feet off the ground, aggressive driving by the occupant coupled with a large front blind spot means pedestrians, especially small children, are much more likely to get mowed down.
The rise in pedestrian fatalities over the past decade is directly correlated with an increased prevalence in trucks and SUVs on the road. Blind spots inherent in large vehicles should require specialized driver training, or requirement to obtain a CDL. But nope, in America, freedom to wield a 6000 pound mobile living room to drive yourself to your suburban office park and intimidate pedestrians and cyclists is more important than keeping our residents alive.