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In the last twenty years, dozens of cities and towns from around the world have joined the unenviable
ranks of communities where mass-casualty events have taken place.
Places like Bojaya (Columbia), Madrid, London, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Istanbul, Berlin, Brussels, Beirut,
Bangkok, New York, Orlando and Christchurch, are just some of the more than 60 global examples. The
names – historically associated with greatness and the best of what humanity can achieve in common
cause – are tinged today with a sense of loss; a loss of life, a loss of innocence, and a lingering sadness
that no one is safe.
And while it’s true mass casualty events continue unabated, the lessons learned from each tragedy is
ongoing, too. Chief among those lessons learned is the need to pre-plan for their occurrence, aligning
best practices with best technologies – even when we pray these incidents won’t occur. This is true for all
agencies dealing with forensic investigation, but it’s especially the case in smaller police, fire and
emergency response departments, organizations that have yet to fully implement a variety of
pre-incident planning techniques.
In the US government’s own 9/11 commission report on the September 11 attacks, the authors cite four
kinds of failures “in imagination, policy, capabilities and management.” Today, those same pillars of
performance shape modern mass-incident response – not only in the US, but around the world.
Brenda Butler, a Manager and Field Application Engineer for FARO® Technologies Inc., a global leader in
public safety analytics, boils safety planning and incident response down to a simple question: “what is your after action ‘action’ plan?” Because when the dust clears and the commotion settles, documenting
the crime scene evidence is critical to answering the who-what-when-where-and-whys of how an incident
took place.
For FARO® and its public safety hardware and software solutions like the FARO® Focus Laser
Scanner, the FARO® Zone Software and the FARO® SCENE Software, this is the essential question the
company’s technology helps to answer.
Of course, the quality of that answer depends largely on the ability of crime scene investigators to master
the technological tools they’ve been given. If that technology, a 3D scanner, a software program, a drone,
etc, is used incorrectly, or its use is not properly coordinated with other agencies in mutual aid (where
police, fire, government and health agencies coordinate their incident response and share resources)
then its forensic reconstruction value is negated.
“Documenting and preserving evidence is more critical today than it’s ever been,” Butler explained.
“Because juries today don’t believe witness statements like they used to; they want proof; they want to
see the evidence and they want transparency. They want unbiased documentation. So, as public safety
professionals, we need to work this all out together before it strikes our neighborhoods. We need to put
an action plan in place. How do we take action when the action stops?”
The key, according to Butler, is to plan ahead and to prepare for incidents in a way that allows maximum
speed of response for investigators (once the shooting has stopped and the assailants are arrested) but
with the flexibility to adapt to a variety of crisis situations. And also to puncture the stereotyped mental
logjam that still permeates the minds of too many law enforcement officials – that a mass incident must
involve a terrorist from oversees when in fact, the troubling reality is that for the United States, homegrown terror usually takes the form of a mass shooting.
There’s also imbedded situational bias to overcome as well. For example, what happens if an emergency
responder is so focused on a potential school shooter that the organization fails to plan for a shooting at
a mall or place of worship? Yes, there are broad similarities, but there are also important differences in terms of building layout, height, types of materials found inside those spaces, and of course, the demographics of the building’s occupants. From a crime scene forensics/data collection standpoint a mass-shooting incident in a mall looks a lot different than inside an elementary school and requires different coordinated efforts from securing the scene to coordinating documentation and investigation.
Then there’s a real concern over agencies that purchase new crime scene investigation equipment,
whether it’s a FARO Focus Laser Scanner or something else like a drone. It’s imperative those agencies
fully appreciate how to use the products they buy, Butler says, but often, this is not the case. This is chiefly due to not only a lack of initial training, but also a failure to test the equipment in the pre-incident planning phase; to have that dry run to in effect, game out mass-casualty incidents long before they actually
occur and to coordinate that response with other organizations, as well as internally in larger agencies
with many departments. While it’s true some agencies do conduct roundtable exercises, often those drills
lack a true on-the-ground component; that is going through the actual plan of processing, documentation
and collection of evidence while preserving the scene for a jury.
“It all comes down to complete workflows with multiple people,” Butler said. “Because the more people
you get in on a multi-agency response, the more complex the situation becomes. If you don’t practice
these logistics it’s not going to work, it’s going to be too chaotic, your incidence response plan is not going
to come together. Knowing when to scan. Knowing how to scan. Knowing how to scan in certain
environments. These are just some of the questions that need to be asked – and answered – well
before a crisis unfolds."
For instance, when a mutual aid call goes out, agencies with multiple scanners might employ team
scanning. In team scanning often one person is in charge and they assign different sub groups to collect
the data. This is to ensure that each scanner is documenting different aspects of the after action ‘action’
correctly without duplication and is critically important following a mass-incident event where numerous
victims may be injured or deceased, leaving a forensic trail, ranging from blood spatter and bone
fragments, to teeth and ballistic evidence.
For a product like the Focus Laser some of the most common pre-incident planning guidelines include:
• Keep your hardware and software up to date – Updates come out with some regularity. Make sure
you download them. (Think how useless a smartphone or tablet becomes if you neglect repeated
software updates and bug fixes) But not only that – make sure you’re familiar with what’s included in
the updates so that the technology doesn’t outpace your existing knowledgebase.
• Create a scan plan and stick to it – Scan only after you’ve located the evidence and identified it
with a marker. Scan only after you’ve mapped in bloodstain patterns and after you’ve documented
the bullet impacts and inserted trajectory rods into the applicable bullet impacts in accordance with
reconstruction guidelines. (Using FARO spheres on your trajectory rods allows for ease of
documentation. The shooting incident can be reconstructed later in the FARO Zone 3D software.)
Remember, the scanner is a line-of-sight measurement device first and foremost, a digital
presentation tools, second. Balance the number of scans taken and the resolution of each scan
making sure you are using the correct scan parameters.
• Scan in a logical, methodical manner – It also means scanning at an angle (especially for vehicles)
to include scan overlap (30 percent per scan) and to avoid backing the scanner into the corners of a
room. Likewise, don’t forget the data void underneath the scanner itself. That too needs to be
documented in a later scan. Make sure you use all 360-degrees of device scanning.
• Be sketchy! – In this context being sketchy means manually mapping out where you plan to scan.
While the technology is great, especially for first-time users, a physical map helps keep you better
organized and could prove useful for courtroom documentation. It may also help if you need to
manually register an image later in the process – especially for large scenes as what might be expected
in a mass-shooting.
• Walk through the scene – Human intuition still counts for a lot. Review the scene and mentally
catalogue what’s most relevant to the after-incident investigation. Don’t just start scanning and leave it
up to the device. Examine and photograph and preserve evidence. For instance, does your scene lack
geometrical variation? If so, consider targets, markers and spheres to denote difference. Each
overlapped scan should include a minimum of two targets.
• Be cognizant of time and efficiency considerations – During a mass-casualty incident there are
deaths and injuries to contend with, but also cities and citizens inconvenienced by the disruption;
roads needs to re-open; buildings need to be deemed safe to re-enter, and other incidents of varying
scope will invariably crop up. Balancing speed and efficiency is critical. And one way to do that is by
simulating dry runs in pre-incident scenarios. Too many scans could be excessive while too few scans
could prove useless. But if you have the time, more scans are better than less.
• Don’t forget your validation scales – Stick to what works and keep it simple. Give yourself at least
3ft to 6ft and use a scale bar, a yardstick (or meter stick) or a pocket rod. (FARO also sells its own NIST
traceable FARO Accuracy Confirmation Scale Bar) Do not use cloth or anything malleable as doing so
can introduce unwanted human error. Even the validation scale might be introduced as evidence. On
the stand you want to trust that validation accuracy. Also, know that known measurements from the
scene are also accepted by the court, but they too can introduce human error. (If using a known
measurement, make sure to document it using photographs of the measurement and in your reports.)
• Become familiar with scanning small spaces – There’s no rule that says the scanner must remain
mounted to the tripod. Test out scanning in small spaces. But remember to protect the quick connect/
release from contamination. Bring something with you and place under it such as a piece of tile or
cover with latex or nitrile gloves. Remember to never cover the scanner itself. Be mindful of obstacles; the scanner must be able to rotate without striking nearby objects or surfaces. And always decontaminate the tripod and anything you bring into the scene.
Last, although 3D laser scanning, sophisticated registration software and drones are all the rage and
properly planning and testing their use in real-world simulations is critical, in the not too distant future,
pre-incident planning will necessarily include more widespread use of virtual reality, too. In fact, Butler
says, it’s just a matter of time before the technology moves beyond its current use with grand juries and
becomes essential to full-on courtroom presentations. Already, scene flythroughs are becoming
increasingly common and compelling life-like animations can be the deciding factor between a guilty or
not guilty verdict. In fact, a new study by the University of South Australia, added significant weight to VRs
courtroom value when it found that jurors were 9.5X more likely to arrive at the same verdict over
an accident scene compared to jurors who relied on photographs alone.
The bottom line: while it’s true that for forensic investigators the bulk of their work begins as an after
action ‘action,’ the reality is, today’s digital detective work must begin as part of an agency’s pre-planning
agenda. Otherwise, when the next tragic incident occurs, said agencies will lack the planning expertise
and execution they require to succeed.
“You are as you train and if you don’t train, you can’t react when the stress and the pressure is there and
things are moving rapidly while under the scrutiny and watchful eye of the public when such high profile
incidents occur,” Butler added.
“Too often we don’t plan for these tragic events because we don’t want people to panic thinking that
we’re going to have one; we want to pretend that it’s never going to happen in our area. But sometimes,
often when we least expect it, awful things do happen. This is about what happens when the smokes
clears. It’s not about having one ‘magic tool’ or several in your toolbox. It’s about proficiency. And how
repeat practice leads to repeat proficiency."