FCIR discuss the practicalities of their work, the need for high accuracy reliable data, and why RIEGL is the best option for achieving this aim.
FCIR are one of the UK’s leading Collision Investigation and Reconstruction Consultancies. Their team is led by Mr Mark Crouch, a Chartered Physicist and Charted Forensic Practitioner (Collision). FCIR are requested to investigate a wide variety of collision scenarios. Accuracy of data captured is crucial to both determining the relevant information from which to make their findings, and for high levels of confidence when taking this information through the court system. RIEGL have been supporting Public Safety and Forensic Investigations for over 15 years and have built up a solid reputation for providing reliable, accurate instrumentation that is easy to operate at all collision scenes, with our partner software RiSOLVE. Here, Mr Crouch relates his experiences:
"As a specialist team of Forensic Collision Investigators, accuracy of measurement is important to us, and like many industries, workflow and processing times are a key consideration. We need a terrestrial laser scanning solution that will dovetail with a number of industry specific software packages with ease. We have trialled and owned a number of different scanning solutions over the years, and it is safe to say that our RIEGL VZ series device is our preferred piece of kit by far.
"Given the nature of our work, we are often mapping roads that have traffic freely flowing, and therefore it is not possible to position the scanner in ‘optimum’ positions. This in turn places extra demands on the device – for example, in one recent deployment, a motorway was scanned from an over bridge where a detailed picture of a collision locus was obtained. It was clear to me that our other scanning solutions would have struggled to obtain the results we needed, however the RIEGL not only met our requirements, but surpassed my expectations. The registration process worked seamlessly, to produce a robust high-quality data set from which we could reliably extract relevant information. When investigating someone’s death, or a multimillion-pound catastrophic loss case it must be right, each and every time, and therefore the RIEGL is the right tool for us.
“Data we have captured is used and accepted within the court system” said Mark Crouch, Head of Investigations at FCIR Ltd. “We are very confident in the accuracy of the device and software, which means measurement uncertainty is minimised. RIEGL UK have been very supportive of our workflow and processes; even during the covid restrictions we have been able to receive training from RIEGL UK, which has meant FCIR has been able to utilise the scanner and software from day. RIEGL are just in a different league.
“Still find it quite difficult to believe it can be that far ahead of the competition, but it just is” added Mr Crouch.
RIEGL provide 3D laser scanners for fast, accurate documentation of crash and crime scene to a large number of the UK’s Police Forensic Collision Investigation Units (FCIU). These are teams of dedicated officers and staff who attend fatal and serious crashes to determine what happened. The data captured has subsequently been used in 1000’s of court cases. The latest VZ-400i units are being widely adopted by those FCIU teams as they update their fleets, with existing VZ-400 units having been in daily use for over 8 years, proving extremely high returns and meeting best value analyses. If you would like to find out more about the current VZ-400i models, please click here.