Time, speed, distance and spatial relationships of objects. These are hardly topics that you would assume the average police officer would ponder. But ponder you do. In the never ending quest to answer the question of why, as well as all the other legal necessities of determining the elements of a crime, you launch into a mission to learn as much as you can about the variables of time, speed, distance and spatial relationships. You want to know how to reconstruct an accident or a crime in order to learn the causal relationship between conduct and result.
It is obvious that in the field of law enforcement it is the luck of the draw whether the responding officer is trained or has the knowledge to determine these things or even cares for that matter. You don’t want to be the guy who arrives at the scene unprepared and ignorant. The easiest way to achieve this is to study the field of accident reconstruction but your department relies on outside instructors for simple advance accident investigative theory let alone reconstruction. So you pay for it yourself and use accumulated leave to attend on your own time.
Mathematics is not your strong suit. In fact, you were a C student of physics and calculus in high school. In college, you were drummed out of engineering because of your thickness for math. This fact is always in the back of your mind. What if you learn just enough to become dangerous? Still, what you can wrap your brain around inspires you. You become the guy other officers come to with questions about their fatal accidents. You have a skid sled that determines coefficient of friction, a function which helps narrow the speed of a vehicle at the time of impact. You help officers learn that what they write in their reports can have lasting and unjust consequences for persons involved. It is a skill that pays off for you when providing depositions for Civil law suits and criminal court.
But you never ever classify yourself as a reconstructionist. You would probably be roasted on the witness stand by a qualified mathematician. So you never state emphatically this or that. When your department opens a position for full time reconstructionist, you test out perfectly. Being appointed to this position would avail you to department paid further training at nationally recognized academies. And after retirement provide a very solid income for consulting. Knowing none have tested better, you wait for the appointment.
Your station commander is not user friendly. You are not his buddy. He is old school. Get out on the road and don’t come back until your shift is over. He calls you into his office and closes the door. This is not the first specialty position you have been appointed to. For a few years now you have conducted inspections on commercial motor carriers. You know more about the trucking industry than most. That fact becomes important in the meeting. Your closest rival scored below you on the test and your commander knows that the Union would back you in an appeal. So he tells you that it is the other guys turn. The other guy is a pain in his ass and he’d like to move him out. If youwant to, you can decline the position and make the commander happy.
These are the kinds of decisions you’d like to take the time to mull over. Life changing ones. But the commander is adamant. He must know now. To push the issue is to take on the full weight of his wrath. Even though you would be under a new supervisor, word travels quickly and schedules can be manipulated to make a person’s life miserable. Later career choices can be closed off. You give in. And in this quick decision your path is altered for the remainder of your career and life experiences. You walk out of his office having chosen a fork in the road whose promise is unknown.
There is a chaos theory that defines a lot of what you think is just destiny or coincidence. It says, “when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.” For visual thinkers like you with dull minds, the double pendulum rod is a lesson in consequences of minuscule sensitivity to condition. You will become a different kind of investigator. One looking into the mind of man but speed, distance and spatial relationship of objects will always be relative. It will always be true that what happens is the consequence of tiny decisions turned tragic. Every time you arrive at a scene, you will look at the glazed eyes of a recently deceased person and promise them to find out the truth about what happened. It is simply all that is left to do.