The car and truck accident attorneys here at Carey, Danis & Lowe are constantly researching developments in our industry and looking at trends to help our clients understand their rights, responsibilities, and what they can do to make their own driving safer.
To that end, you might want to pay attention to some intriguing news out of Kansas City.
A local police department recently unveiled a new technology designed to help Missouri accident investigators do their jobs faster. The equipment – which looks like something out of a 1970s TV show set in the distant future – is designed to help officers map the area of an accident rapidly, collate information, and follow up to conduct additional investigations.
Depending on the size and nature of your Missouri truck or car accident, the evidence could have been dispersed across a vast swath of roadway. This new equipment – called the Sokkia Station – is a super high tech camera that lets accident reconstruction detectives compile evidence quickly from farther away from the accident scene.
These features help for a number of reasons:
- Forensically mapping an accident site is notoriously dangerous work for police investigators and motorists, alike.
The extent to which wrecks can be cleared faster is the extent to which Missouri’s roads can be made safer. One source said that Kansas City police have shaved nearly two hours off of the average clearance time thanks to this camera.
- The camera’s efficacy can also help reduce traffic congestion that follows in the wake of a big crash on some freeways.
According to Kansas City Police Department, Maj. Rich Lockhart, “everybody thinks that police officers are going to get shot or something bad is going to happen… the reality is more police officers die in traffic related incidents than anything else” (quote from Kansas City’s Fox 4 News).
Is this a “win-win” for everybody involved?
There are reasons to be very excited about this new technology – enhanced officer safety obviously being one of them. But any time new technologies are introduced, we need to be on the lookout for unintended consequences. For instance, what if the new technology fails to capture certain critical forensic details? Those missing details – what the great literary figure Sherlock Holmes once called “the dog that didn’t bark” – might ultimately impede your ability to prove liability and collect damages to pay for your health costs, work wages lost, loss of consortium, etc.
New technologies, in other words, can be a double-edged sword.
To maximize your potential personal injury case in Missouri, you may find it hugely useful to connect with an effective accident law firm, like Carey, Danis & Lowe, to understand your potential obstacles and to develop a specific, systematic plan for dealing with them.
