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BPD Hosts Traffic Accident Reconstruction Course

Twenty-nine police officers, including 5 from Bellevue and 24 from various other law enforcement agencies in Nebraska and Iowa are spending a couple of weeks with the BPD learning how to reconstruct traffic accidents. Officers will spend 80 hours learning the specifics of conservation of momentum, time distance and motion, vector analysis, and airborne analysis to include commercial vehicle crash investigation.

Reconstructing traffic crashes is a complex science involving trigonometry formulas and the laws of physics. One of the first things police try to do after a serious crash is determine whether speed was a factor in it. Bellevue’s Sergeant Joe Milos said, "from that we can talk about other things, we can take it back in time from the point of impact to determine where vehicles were at any given time." Milos added, "This training will not only allow a more efficient and accurate analysis of a serious crash, but will allow officers the tools to defend their crash analysis in a court of law."

BPD is hosting the training; the instructors are from the Institute of Police Technology and Management at The University of North Florida. The training runs July 16th through July 27th.