Leica scanners aiding police work across the globe

19/01/2012

Leica ScanStation C10s are proving popular with police departments and collision investigators across the globe, with investigators in the US state of Georgia making plans to add to their current set of scanners.

Just weeks after the British government announced £2.7 million plans to equip all police forces in the UK with the laser scanners, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has trained all of its crime scene specialists on the equipment, and announced plans to buy more.

Crime and collision scene investigator with the GBI, Audey Murphy, said that the C10 is cutting down his measuring and scanning time of evidence at a scene by several hours, and is proving invaluable.

“It would take me a year to do what this machine does in a couple of hours,” Murphy said. “It’s like an advanced crime scene sketch. It takes literally hundreds of thousands of measurements at a scene.”

The Special Agent in Charge, Jerry Scott, said that the GBI currently has four scanners and is planning to buy at least four more. The bureau has been using them for a year-and-a-half already, and they have proven invaluable at a number of crime scenes, where investigators are no longer bound in their scene measurements by the time it takes to make them.

“(Before the scanners), we were only measuring what we thought was important at the time of the scene,” Scott explained, stating that investigators no longer have to worry if they have missed an important measurement because of time constraints.