[CopWednesday 3] Memento se Atbelti

First of all, I got transferred to a different group at work. I've left the Fugitive Unit behind, and am now an intern of the most hardcore, badass group in the entire police force: Records Section.

Yes, that was sarcasm. But to be fair, they're all really nice people to work with, and they do have a lot more for me to do. I'm still a little disappointed I won't be getting to hunt down fugitives, but such is life.

An upside of getting transferred is that I'm now also doing some work for the Crime Analysis Unit. Yes, just when I thought I was out of research, they drag me back in. Crime Analysis is a cool group. It turns out that the four ladies working in one big back office in the bowels of Headquarters actually wield a lot of political sway: They get to choose which numbers the police show the media, state senate, governor... Because they're a trusted source, their analysis is pretty much accepted as fact (and it is, but anyone who knows about journalism, or about research, knows there's always a slant). It's subtle, but significant.

It works both ways, though, since they have to answer the questions people actually ask. And lately, people in town hall meetings (those local government things you've been skipping because you thought they didn't matter) have been asking why so many people get run over by cars.

Enter the Crime Analysis Unit, who, overworked as it is, requires additional help to answer the County's burning pedestrian-accident questions.

Enter Me, head of the newly-formed Hendrix Pedestrian Collision Taskforce.

So basically, I've been going through the records and prioritizing (read: sorting) the pedestrian-related accidents for the last week. My preliminary conclusions: Don't Jaywalk, Idiot.

My weekly training seminar this week was about the CRU: Collision Reconstruction Unit. Essentially, this is a group of detectives who have been trained to analyze a car accident in order to determine what happened. They're sent out for any fatal or life-threatening accident, as well as any crash involving a government dignitary. And yes, they're the guys holding up traffic during rush hour, since any road someone dies on instantly becomes a crime scene.

This was an interesting presentation to me for three reasons:

1) There's actual physics involved! That'll get my mom to stop complaining about wasting my degree! Although, by his own admission, the detective giving the seminar was "never any good in school; never even took a physics class."* So just think how awesome I'd be at this!

2) I'd been reading accident reports all week, and recognized a lot of the things he was talking about. In fact, one of the case studies he presented I recognized from a report I'd entered into the database a few days before: Wet night, Subaru two-door comes across the double-yellow and gets cut in half by a Chevy; driver of Subaru killed instantly, Chevy driver walks away unharmed (mass beats airbags any day, Smartcar driver). It even happened only a couple miles from my house.

3) I'd been assured there'd be scenes of horrible carnage involved, and like all red-blooded American teenagers, I love me some carnage. Wait, I'm not 15 anymore, and should've outgrown that by now? Damnit...

I'm half joking about the third, of course. At some level, it's rather f-ed up to look at some of the gruesome crime scene photos they took and feel anything other than sadness. Yet I, and many other people (I hope? I'd hate to be the only one...) feel a sort of dread fascination with that kind of material. Part of you wants to look away, but the other part simply can't (I almost said "like a train wreck," but figured that'd've been too similar a simile).

I'm not going to try to blame this on our being desensitized to violence. In the medieval period, public executions were a common diversion, and while granted, those were pretty barbaric times, first-hand experience with violence is nothing new to society. If anything, we're probably less desensitized to violence than other generations, in that at least we have a television screen between us and the blood-splatters.

Kierkegaard (who I'm appreciating more and more these days) noted that, while humans witness death every day, and understand from an objective standpoint that everybody will one day die, few recognize subjectively (inwardly, via the emotions) that they themselves will die as well. In order to live passionately, humans need to embrace the fact that their own death is both "inevitable and temporally unpredictable."

According to some researchers somewhere (Skidmore College, the University of Arizona, and Colorado University at Colorado Springs, specifically) there are implicit emotional reactions associated with the existential knowledge of one's inevitable death. This trait may or may not be unique to humans; I surely haven't seen many dolphins writing morbid poetry, though perhaps they're trying.

But if there's anything photos of a car accident should remind us, it's that at any moment, we could abruptly cease to be alive. And if that doesn't bother you at least a little bit, you're not reading enough Poe.

Next Time: The Singularity, with Surprisingly Few Sci-Fi References!

Further Reading: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

*I've noticed something about cops: They will never, ever admit to being of even mildly-above-average intelligence. This despite the fact that at least one of the Fugitive Unit detectives is an attorney, and several are pursuing their Masters (admittedly, in Business...). The CRU guy today probably knows more practical physics than I do, but to hear him explain it, the entire operation runs on light and magic, and some computer program solves the whole thing for them. It probably has to do with maintaining a 'tough guy' image.