The conversation about an efficient way to reconstruct car crash scenes started at the Starkville Police Department after the deaths of two men in a Rockhill Road car accident in August, SPD Cpl. Chris Jackson said.
Three more people have died in car crashes on Starkville roads since then. Now SPD will receive technology that creates accurate 3D renderings of car crashes and crime scenes, thanks to a board of aldermen vote on Tuesday to allocate $2,700 in city funds, which officials said will be reimbursed through a $40,000 grant from the state for equipment and personnel.
The device is called a C3 Mechanical Total Station, made by law enforcement software company Trimble Forensics. It uses data and evidence from the scene of the crash, such as tire tread marks and the make of a model of a car, to create a 3D image of the accident on a computer screen and determine details like the speed, angle and impact of the collision.
The technology allows police to finish working a scene more quickly and get out of harm’s way on busy roads, Jackson said. It also processes perishable evidence more quickly and yields more accurate conclusions than manual data collection and investigation, he said.
“We’re trying to get past the days of putting measuring tape on the highways, to just having a Total Station on the side of the highway where we can point out the exact coordinates,” Jackson said.
Other law enforcement agencies in Mississippi, including the Gulfport and Biloxi police departments, have been using Total Station technology for years, but it will be a new in-house resource for SPD. The department used to borrow accident reconstruction software from Mississippi Highway Patrol or the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation on occasion, but time is of the essence in car crash investigations, Jackson said.
“Sometimes (MBI) takes several hours to show up on the scene and we’ll have perishable evidence that needs to be collected quickly,” he said. “The crash team at Highway Patrol has been very kind to us, but we can’t always rely on the availability of others.”
In addition to five vehicle fatalities since the school year started in August, two pedestrians have been hit by cars and survived, Jackson said. One person died and 17 were injured in car accidents in Starkville in 2018, according to the Mississippi Office of Highway Safety.
Starkville has four state highways and one U.S. highway, so a great deal of traffic passes through the city from other places, in addition to the regular influx of students and visitors at Mississippi State University, Jackson said.
Total Station technology has existed since the 1990s, but the need is just reaching Starkville, and the number of highways in the city makes precise data collection all the more necessary, even when a crash does not result in criminal charges, said Bryce Adams, an applied forensics expert at Trimble Forensics.
The Total Station can implicate or exonerate someone of responsibility for an accident, Jackson said. He gave the example of a collision at the intersection of Highway 12 and South Montgomery Street, where the speed limit is 35 miles per hour and where SPD was able to use a Total Station.
“We were able to determine that the vehicle was traveling 37 miles an hour, so it had nothing to do with speed,” he said. “(The problem) was actually the pedestrian.”
Mayor Lynn Spruill said the city supports the police department’s efforts to address car crashes more efficiently, especially if it helps prevent future accidents.
“Anything we can do to be preemptive in trying to understand what’s going on and how we can enhance the safety of our community is absolutely what we support,” Spruill said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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