Broken Arrow Police using new technology to investigate traffic accidents

Using lasers to investigate crime and traffic scenes. It's called the LI-DAR and it's in use right here in Green Country. <br><br>In the past, Broken Arrow Police Officers at a traffic accident

Monday, December 30th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Using lasers to investigate crime and traffic scenes. It's called the LI-DAR and it's in use right here in Green Country.

In the past, Broken Arrow Police Officers at a traffic accident would take pictures and use tape to measure skid marks while gathering evidence. The LI-DAR does all of that.

The laser acts as a camera. Officers use it to take measurements from the point of impact between vehicles, measures skid marks and that information is downloaded into the data collector. Then, the information is brought back to the station where it's hooked up to a computer and downloaded.

Ed Ferguson with the Broken Arrow Police Department, "Once you drag all your fixtures all your cars, that type of thing to where your points were located at, then you simply remove the points from the diagram and gives you the two dimensional drawing and from there you can generate the 3-D drawing."

The 3-D drawing gives you an exact picture of what the scene looks like and allows you to walk through it.

Officers say the LI-DAR will cut the time spent investigating a scene by half.