Math is important in law enforcement especially when it comes to car crash reconstruction. Policing agencies use math to determine how fast a vehicle was going before the collision occurred, at times this can be used to determine who was at fault for insurance purpose or for taking criminal action against. A professor named Caples wrote an article that talks about the formulas police officers use to determine the speed of vehicles. The formula is S=√30FD where S is the speed of the vehicle, F is the drag factor and d is the distance of the skid mark. The drag factor is determined by F=f/w where f is the force (a vector) and W is the weight of the vehicle (Caples, 1992). This is for the skids marks left by a vehicle locking their brakes.
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