Welcome to another edition of It’s in the Details, a short newsletter intended to provide helpful information for those in the litigation industry who deal with forensic engineering experts and their work.
A New Source for Crash Scene Imagery - GeoSocial Sweeps
It’s happened to all legal-forensic teams: you are investigating a significant vehicle crash, but perhaps inexplicably, you are not aware of the police or anyone else having taken photographs or videos of the crash scene. And, to make matters worse, the police took no physical measurements, and because the accident happened years ago, any physical evidence which was once present at the scene is now gone. Your collision reconstructionist tells you that without photos of the vehicles or the site and with no EDR data from the cars, there’s nothing much that he or she can do to reconstruct the crash.
Enter a new source for finding crash scene imagery in such situations: “GeoSocial sweeps.” Pioneered by today’s high tech surveillance firms, this technique involves surveying major social media sites for imagery of crash scenes posted by bystanders or even parties to the incident. This imagery is pinpointed by filtering social media posts that are geotagged with GPS data near the crash location, and which were posted near the date of the incident in question.
One such provider which Dial Engineering is in the process of teaming with is DigiStream. You can learn more about its GeoSocial Sweep product here:
https://digistream.com/solutions/geosocialseries
And, as DigiStream points out on their website, one bonus of performing a GeoSocial sweep is not only obtaining potential photos and videos of the crash scene, but getting the contact information of otherwise unknown eyewitnesses who might provide testimony regarding the facts of the crash.
So, the next time your investigation of a crash stalls due to lack of images and witness descriptions, consider adding a GeoSocial sweep to your data collection efforts.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to us with any technical questions you might have about this or other topics related to forensic engineering.