Speaker 1: Hey, favorite time of the.
Speaker 2: Week, Lawrence, tell me what's you know?
Speaker 1: In the event that we one day get pulled over.
Speaker 3: We like to keep the Victorian police on side and
Speaker 3: we like to investigate different areas of the popos.
Speaker 4: Well, this is a very interesting area of the Victoria
Speaker 4: place we've got this morning. We've got detectives Janell and
Speaker 4: meet Hardyman in here from the Collision Reconstruction and Mechanical
Speaker 4: Investigation unit.
Speaker 2: That is a mouthful morning guys.
Speaker 1: Morning, good morning. Sorry, what are their last names?
Speaker 2: They're married Joe and me Hardiman who who's the boss?
Speaker 5: Very quickly as well?
Speaker 6: At work and.
Speaker 4: The team that you work in responds to traffic accidents,
Speaker 4: road accidents. Do you guys work on the same cases
Speaker 4: together or do you get sent to different jobs?
Speaker 6: Not really so each job we have a crew that
Speaker 6: goes out from the major Collision unit and usually we
Speaker 6: have one reconstruction as that goes out. But now and
Speaker 6: again more hit what we consider a big job and
Speaker 6: in the on days occasions sometimes we head out.
Speaker 4: Is that hard because I imagine and we speak to
Speaker 4: the police a lot, and you have to somehow try
Speaker 4: and leave a little bit of your work at work
Speaker 4: and go home, and that's like a safe place away
Speaker 4: from all of the horrific, horrendous things that you see.
Speaker 4: When you guys don't get to do that, do you
Speaker 4: talk about work at home or do you try and
Speaker 4: clock off?
Speaker 7: We do. We do talk about work at home because
Speaker 7: it's a big party of life, just like I suppose
Speaker 7: you guys as well. But we're pretty good at being
Speaker 7: able to separate our work from your home life. And
Speaker 7: obviously being the top of work that we do and
Speaker 7: the amount of tragedy and things that we see, it's
Speaker 7: really important to be able to do.
Speaker 5: In my previous life working as a general news reporter,
Speaker 5: I was deployed to many car accidents, one of which
Speaker 5: was in car Dross in Mildua where sixteen's are walking
Speaker 5: home from a party and we're mowed down by a
Speaker 5: drunk driver who was jailed. The second one was Robert Farquerson,
Speaker 5: a father who drove his three kids into a damn
Speaker 5: on Father's Day. This is tough work and it's high
Speaker 5: pressure work. I know those cases stay with me to
Speaker 5: this day. I can remember exactly what that scene looked like.
Speaker 5: Every twist, every turn in the road. Do you sort
Speaker 5: of carry a little bit of that with you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, i'd like to say you don't, but you do.
Speaker 6: And the interesting I think with a lot of our jobs,
Speaker 6: the ones that are really tough emotionally sometimes aren't the
Speaker 6: ones that hit the media at all, Right, And I
Speaker 6: guess that's where we talk about you're going home and
Speaker 6: having that other one that knows what you're going through,
Speaker 6: because yeah, also go out on the weekend. Some of
Speaker 6: saw you at that job that looked really bad. But
Speaker 6: some of the worst jobs that we've been to and
Speaker 6: the hardest to deal with, and the ones that we
Speaker 6: carry the most emotional baggage with people don't even know about.
Speaker 4: So just for people who are listening to this, when
Speaker 4: there is a serious road accident, you guys are there
Speaker 4: and your job is to piece together what happened, who's
Speaker 4: who's at fault, how.
Speaker 2: Fast they were going?
Speaker 4: Was that there must be a science to that that
Speaker 4: that you've got to park the emotional side and just
Speaker 4: look at the facts sometimes, right, because you must get
Speaker 4: to jobs and be so angry about things that you've seen.
Speaker 3: So can you tell, yeah, like what the speed the
Speaker 3: car was doing?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, we can. So there's our jobs to look
Speaker 7: at the physical evidence yep, so the skid mark, so
Speaker 7: you know, the crush damage on a car and hair
Speaker 7: they've they've crushed together. And also look at the electronic
Speaker 7: data that we can get out of our cars as well.
Speaker 3: So will you then, for example, say if I was
Speaker 3: involved in a crash and I was driving a camera,
Speaker 3: you would investigate how much the camera is crashed.
Speaker 1: And then have you.
Speaker 3: Guys got a base where you will crush certain cars
Speaker 3: to see the damage and try and compare them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah we do, and yeah we do so,
Speaker 7: and there's a whole lot of testing done by you know,
Speaker 7: RACV and all those house Safe as your Car and
Speaker 7: overseas as well. But there's also you know, in Toyota vehicles,
Speaker 7: there's a whole lot of data that we can get
Speaker 7: out and different cars have different data and stuff and
Speaker 7: sometimes it makes their job easier and sometimes it makes it.
Speaker 3: On a lighter note, just with the data, can you
Speaker 3: get data from my car for example, and see how
Speaker 3: many drive throughs I've gone through and.
Speaker 1: Stuff like that. Possibly, Yeah, that's an issue.
Speaker 5: I was just about to say, because inevitably a lot
Speaker 5: of these accidents will end up in court. Do you
Speaker 5: have to then testify in court, need to reconstruct the
Speaker 5: accident in front of a jury, in front of a judge.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so we go to court most weeks, so we're
Speaker 6: with in the criminal court system. We're considered experts, so
Speaker 6: we're able to give opinion evidence that comes from as
Speaker 6: a result of our training, our experience, our expertise. We
Speaker 6: all also have tertiary qualifications, so we've all got science
Speaker 6: and engineering degrees that assists us in using that physical
Speaker 6: evidence to work out what's going on.
Speaker 1: How long you go to be in the force until
Speaker 1: you can move into a unit like this.
Speaker 6: There's not a specific time. Obviously you have to go
Speaker 6: through your first couple of years of training. But we're
Speaker 6: also detective, so there's that time taken to qualify as
Speaker 6: a detective. Then you also required the external qualification. So
Speaker 6: how long it takes to actually get there. I think
Speaker 6: our most junior is maybe seven years, but it's more
Speaker 6: about how long you stay yet. Yeah, that's where you
Speaker 6: really you can't learn this job before you arrived, So
Speaker 6: anyone who joins a unit, because we've grown quite a
Speaker 6: lot over the last few years. So when I started
Speaker 6: back in, so I was an investigator first and then
Speaker 6: went into reconstruction. So I started reconstruction two thousand and
Speaker 6: seven and at that point there was two of us.
Speaker 6: But we're ring quite rapidly. But the people don't really
Speaker 6: leave our unit once you arrive.
Speaker 3: Which I almost find surprising because I imagine it'd be
Speaker 3: a big burnout.
Speaker 2: You'd think that there would be a shelf life on it.
Speaker 3: Hey, yeah, we've got to take a quick break, but
Speaker 3: if you guys can stay with us, we are probing
Speaker 3: the Popo this morning. The Collision Reconstruction and Investigation Unit
Speaker 3: joining us. I know you guys have worked on some
Speaker 3: very high profile cases and we want to come back
Speaker 3: and talk about that next. And unfortunately we're going into
Speaker 3: what would be a busy season for you guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was about to ask you about that. I
Speaker 4: that's going to affect a lot of Melbourne ins that
Speaker 4: I want to ask you about. Next.
Speaker 3: We'll go there after this play a cool The cops
Speaker 3: are here, Lawrence, tell.
Speaker 5: Me what's you know?
Speaker 1: Janella mek Or a husband and wife team.
Speaker 3: They are also detectives in the Collision Reconstruction and Mechanical
Speaker 3: Investigation Unit. These guys are on scene at some very
Speaker 3: high profile accidents.
Speaker 5: Here in Melbourne, who detectives the kids wouldn't get away
Speaker 5: with anything.
Speaker 2: Three kids, not that we know of.
Speaker 4: So hey, you guys, there have been some horrific road
Speaker 4: accidents in Victoria over the years, and in particular recently.
Speaker 4: I mean there was a terrible accident last night. We
Speaker 4: obviously saw the horrific incident at Auburn South Primary School,
Speaker 4: the Dalsford accident. These are the kind of things that
Speaker 4: you guys have to turn up to be on the scene,
Speaker 4: see these hurriydous things and try and peaks together what happened?
Speaker 1: Will you deployed any of those situations or all of them?
Speaker 6: So we went to both. We actually went to both
Speaker 6: of those together.
Speaker 4: How does that affect you when you see these terrible accidents?
Speaker 4: Your parents, you've got three kids.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we've got a job to do and it's important
Speaker 7: that a lot of responsibility. It's a massive responsibility to
Speaker 7: investigate someone's either death or life changing injury, and we
Speaker 7: obviously take that really seriously. So you have to put
Speaker 7: aside your own personal feelings forbidden. We can deal with
Speaker 7: that later, but at the time you've got to we've
Speaker 7: got a job to do.
Speaker 4: We've got to get on with it because then you've
Speaker 4: got not just families, but you've got communities desperate for answers.
Speaker 2: That that must be hard.
Speaker 6: For sure. There are times that after a crash, a
Speaker 6: tend to race to you avoid listening to and watching
Speaker 6: the medium to avoid some of that pressure and just
Speaker 6: get on with the job. Plus just work with what
Speaker 6: we've got.
Speaker 3: You've got teenage kids nineteen twenty. That must be a
Speaker 3: bloody scary job when you're going to a lot of
Speaker 3: accidents where you know it's kids the same age that
Speaker 3: you've got getting in these car crashes.
Speaker 6: It is, And I think for sure that that's probably
Speaker 6: the jobs that are hardest is where there's something about
Speaker 6: the job that you relate to, so where it involves kids,
Speaker 6: where where you look, you know you're looking at the
Speaker 6: mother or father of a child and think that that
Speaker 6: could be me, and it's very hard. So the actual
Speaker 6: job is where it's very easy to focus on what
Speaker 6: you've got both hours now to get your license, Well.
Speaker 2: It's one hundred and twenty hours, right.
Speaker 4: And I was about to say road safety must be
Speaker 4: so important, of it's important to everyone, but you guys
Speaker 4: see it firsthand how important it is to be safe
Speaker 4: on the roads. One hundred and twenty hours is what
Speaker 4: we're sposed to do to pass our learners and to
Speaker 4: get our peace, and there would be a lot of
Speaker 4: families and a lot of kids who are finishing school.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: I know I wasn't eighteen until year after I finished school,
Speaker 4: but a lot of my friends were eighteen in that
Speaker 4: year and they weren't allowed to get their driver's license
Speaker 4: until after they finished school, which is such a strange thing. Right,
Speaker 4: you finish school, you're allowed to party, you get your
Speaker 4: driver's license. What message would you have for people and
Speaker 4: kids out there who are about to get their driver's
Speaker 4: license and about to get this freedom which is amazing,
Speaker 4: but it's also scary.
Speaker 8: It is.
Speaker 1: It's so.
Speaker 7: That learner's thing. It's so important that people actually do
Speaker 7: their one hundred and twenty hours and learn in all
Speaker 7: different types of conditions. It's so easy, and we've been
Speaker 7: there recently with our three kids, that we it's so
Speaker 7: easy to say, oh, it's raining or it's staff and
Speaker 7: it's hard to sit in the so and it's scary
Speaker 7: as a parent to sit in the passenger seat for
Speaker 7: your kids learned to drive.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, my Mum used to get out and
Speaker 4: I would walk home. We had the biggest fight in
Speaker 4: all seriousness.
Speaker 7: It's so important.
Speaker 3: I struggle with a roundabout.
Speaker 2: I struggled with the whole thing.
Speaker 8: To be honest, based on what you see at work,
Speaker 8: I mean, what troubles you the most, or what mistakes
Speaker 8: are people making roads right now?
Speaker 6: So when we talk about mistakes, there's big mistakes and
Speaker 6: there's small mistakes. There's people who just like concentration for
Speaker 6: a short time and just missed that pedestrian crossing and crossing.
Speaker 6: There are people who are intentionally, you know, driving at
Speaker 6: really high speeds, or we're still seeing drugs and alcohol
Speaker 6: in so many of our cases. But the one that
Speaker 6: that I'm at odds with, there are a large number
Speaker 6: of people that have been killed on the roads in
Speaker 6: the last couple of years not wearing seatbelts, and I
Speaker 6: just don't get it. I don't get it.
Speaker 4: I'm guilty of it. I'll say I get in a
Speaker 4: car whenever I drive, I throw it on. But I'm
Speaker 4: guilty of jumping in the back of an uber and
Speaker 4: chatting to people and then going, oh my god, my
Speaker 4: seat belt's not on.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying I'm guilty of it. Like I go,
Speaker 2: I'm not.
Speaker 4: Putting my seat belt on, but I'll jump in with
Speaker 4: friends and we're chatting, and then I'm like, oh, got
Speaker 4: my seat belt's not on and I'm in a car
Speaker 4: with someone who I don't know driving me home.
Speaker 1: Here's one for you.
Speaker 3: I remember Scotty Camp from the block came in and
Speaker 3: he's got teenage kids and he was saying that he's
Speaker 3: biggest advice was he would buy his kids a single
Speaker 3: cab ute when they were allowed to drive, because that
Speaker 3: way there was no back seat to fill it with
Speaker 3: all your mates giving you peer pressure. Is out of
Speaker 3: all the investigations you guys have done and stuff, is
Speaker 3: there a brand of car or a certain type of
Speaker 3: vehicle that you think is safer?
Speaker 7: Oh? I think the more modern cars are obviously much safer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, there is a huge difference. Yeah, there is.
Speaker 3: And then what about these little hatchbacks that a lot
Speaker 3: of kids everybody, no exactly, but you know, like kids
Speaker 3: will go on by a little you know, second amberina
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, so they just crumble.
Speaker 7: Unfortunately, what we're saying on the roads these days is
Speaker 7: that there's a lot bigger cars now driving.
Speaker 1: The big American cars and even.
Speaker 7: You know you've got to school pick up and see
Speaker 7: all the SUVs. And unfortunately the physics doesn't lie that
Speaker 7: the bigger the car versus smaller car, the bigger cars
Speaker 7: always going to win.
Speaker 4: Unfortunate, which sucks because not everyone can absolutely car.
Speaker 2: But it's it's been careful and.
Speaker 7: It's more about that if you know, no text message
Speaker 7: or no phone call is worth someone's life, and you know,
Speaker 7: does it really matter, Like just wait a minute till
Speaker 7: you have stopped.
Speaker 2: I wish put your seat belt on.
Speaker 5: I wish we had the guys here a few weeks
Speaker 5: ago when that pole just jumped out of nowhere in
Speaker 5: the Nova car park, Jason, we've God have reconstructed the
Speaker 5: scene and guys.
Speaker 3: I was I was reversing here at the over car
Speaker 3: park out of nowhere, came out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: I don't reckon. You need the.
Speaker 4: Maths to work out what I'd love to know in
Speaker 4: your parking.
Speaker 3: Professional opinion, do you think the pylons in an underground
Speaker 3: car park should be painted the same color as the
Speaker 3: black wall or do you think there should be some
Speaker 3: sort of high visit color visibility?
Speaker 2: Thank you very much none of us have had a
Speaker 2: problem with.
Speaker 1: One friend the misery out to the car park.
Speaker 4: In all seriousness, you guys do an amazing job and
Speaker 4: you see some horrific things, but thank you for persisting
Speaker 4: and helping make our roadsake. We love the Victorian Police
Speaker 4: and you do an amazing job, so thank you.
Speaker 7: Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1: Good on you guys, Thank you, And they're coming from
Speaker 1: leave for this like.
Speaker 2: Get a day in loop Lauren, Lauren wake up feeling Good.
Speaker 4: Number one hundred Lauren on socials,