Fatal Accident Reconstruction Team

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In certain local police departments in the United States, the Fatal Accident Reconstruction Team is a group of police officers dedicated to investigating motor vehicle accidents that result in death. The investigation of accidents with no survivors is of particular interest, because the detectives often have no eyewitnesses to give an account of the event. Thus they must rely on forensic evidence, such as tire skid marks, to determine what happened. An accident with both survivors and fatalities is also of concern, because one cannot depend on the survivor(s) to accurately recount the accident. Their memory may not be perfect, and they may be lying to avoid charges such as vehicular homicide. In general, the teams try to determine the exact sequence of events that led to the accident, much like criminal detectives attempt to reconstruct crimes.

These departments rarely refer to their team with an acronym, for obvious reasons.