Career Investigations: The Career Path To Law Enforcement

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The career path I have chosen, is law enforcement. There is a lot of math involved in police work and criminal justice, much more than I had expected. Police officers use algebra skills in traffic accident investigations and ballistic trajectory investigations. Crime scene investigators use trigonometry in crime scene reconstruction, while detectives use statistics to determine crime rates in neighborhoods and cities. Lastly, Precincts and police officers also use modular arithmetic to determine their work schedules and days off. Mathematics play an important part of a police officers career. Without mathematics, it would be very hard to protect citizens and loved ones from crime.
First, police officers must use complex algebraic formulas to …show more content…

Algebra helps investigating officers calculate the speed of the vehicles involved, the distance traveled and the vehicles ' locations at the time of collision. The investigators can find the length of the skid marks and their radius also known as “yaw” to rearrange the formula to find speed. Which shows them how fast the suspect was trying to get away or who actually cause the accident in a car wreck. In cases involving death, investigators use algebra to estimate the time of death using such factors as climate conditions and body temperature. For example, Sally died 6 hours ago, but criminal investigators did not get a call about anything until she was dead for 5 hours. So, they can take her temperature to determine when she died or was potentially murdered. If she is pretty warm, she must have recently died. If she is cold temperature, she could have died several hours ago. In Sally 's case, she would be cooler than someone who died an hour before investigators showed up. Thus, they will have more information about what potentially happened when she died. Algebra is also very useful for ballistics trajectory investigations in firearms-related crimes. “Mathematical Description and Solution Approach, let x(t) and y(t) denote the horizontal and vertical displacement of the bullet at the time t. Similarly define vx(t) and vy(t) to be the horizontal and vertical velocity of the bullet at the time t. Use f’(t) to denote the derivative …show more content…

Officers use modular arithmetic to determine when they will have a day off so they can plan out their schedules. As we’ve recently learned, we use modular arithmetic all the time. It’s useful for situations where you want to start over, time being the most obvious. Say it’s 9 o’clock. What time will it be 5 hours from now? Unless you’re in the military you’d say 2 o’clock, right? That’s modular arithmetic, the modulus being 12. To add hours, we simply add them together: 9+5=14, and then subtract 12 to get 2 12 months means that 5 months after September is the second month of the next year (February). The same for minutes (modulo 60) and hours (arithmetic modulo 60). For example: Brian is a police officer, his work schedule is 3 days on duty, 4 days off, then 4 days on duty, 3 days off then the pattern continues. Assuming that today is the first day of the work pattern. A) Will Brian be working 30 days from today? B) Brian’s wife Holly is 8 weeks pregnant and is due January 2017, will Brian have the day off 7 months from

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