It’s Corporal Dave Noon’s last day of his four-day shift. He’s attended six collision files in the last three days—that’s a lot of serious, life-altering collisions in a short time. It’s tiring and draining, but that’s the nature of the job and that’s OK with Cpl Noon.
Cpl. Noon is a member of the highly-respected Lower Mainland Integrated Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Service (ICARS). As the name suggests, the team is integrated with municipal police agencies and the BC RCMP, with the bulk of funding from municipalities in the Lower Mainland. Cpl. Noon is a 16-year member of the West Vancouver Police Department and has been seconded to ICARS for the last seven years. The ICARS team is responsible for the forensic reconstruction of fatal and serious injury collisions, and it is often a lifetime career choice for many including Cpl. Noon.
ICARS has its offices at BC RCMP Headquarters in the City of Surrey’s Green Timbers neighbourhood, but more often he and his fellow officers are on the road responding to fatal and life-threatening collisions, lending their expertise in these investigations, with the intention of giving families some understanding of what took place and holding those responsible, accountable for their actions.
“When people die in collisions it’s such a shock and trauma to the family, as well as to a community or even our country,” says Cpl. Noon, recalling the effect the Humboldt Broncos bus had in 2018 in Saskatchewan which killed 16 people and left 13 others with serious, life-altering injuries. “That crash touched our country so deeply. People wanted to understand how this happened, while the victim’s families wanted justice for their loved ones.”
ICARS officers rarely speak directly to the families. Their analysis of the collision is the voice officers use to communicate independently to those left behind. Staff Sergeant Dave Jewers, a member of the RCMP who leads the teams, says that while each call entails tragic circumstances, the rewards for the officers come from giving a voice to the deceased persons by determining, on behalf of those left behind, what happened. This analysis can reveal the hidden truth of what caused a fatal crash, says S./Sgt. Jewers.
Growing up in North Vancouver, Cpl. Noon went to the University of British Columbia where he completed a Bachelor of Science degree. Many ICARS officers have science and math backgrounds because so much of the work is based on physics, math and forensic science.
Cpl. Noon joined the West Vancouver Police Department in 2005 and in the first three weeks on the job, he was called to a fatal collision. He was the first person on scene. “It was an eye-opening experience at how quickly things can turn so tragic in a person’s life,” says Cpl. Noon. “We did a lot of research on that file and through the reconstruction of the crash the collision analyst was able to give the family some understanding of what happened that September morning. That call still stands out as one of the most impactful calls I’ve had in policing.”
It sent Cpl. Noon on a trajectory that hadn’t occurred to him when he first joined the police. As one of the first officers selected to Alexa’s Team, getting impaired drivers off the road to keep others safe became a driving force in Cpl. Noon’s career. “Through witnessing tragedy involving impaired and dangerous driving, road safety became really important to me,” he says.
Cpl. Noon’s first secondment was to the Integrated Road Safety Unit (IRSU). The provincial team targets speeding, aggressive and impaired driving, proper restraints (seat belts, car seats) and distracted driving. “This was road safety through enforcement,” says Cpl. Noon. “With IRSU, I attended another high-profile collision in Coquitlam which became a criminal investigation. I followed the investigation as closely as I could. I was so curious about how the collision reconstructionists used physical evidence to determine the sequence of events of the crash.”
With the ICARS team, he thought, “This is an area of policing where I felt I could hold people accountable for being responsible for a person’s death.”
Cpl. Noon hasn’t looked back since. “It’s very meaningful and rewarding work,” he says. He’s good at what he does, but he wants to get even better. The technology and techniques change often and the training is a constant at ICARS. It prioritizes improvements in employee knowledge, skills and abilities in collision analysis through peer review, collaboration, training and independent research.
Public education is also important to Cpl. Noon. If time permits, he will deliver a presentation to youth groups. “Usually the first question is what does ICARS stand for? Once we cover this, we get into what we do as Collision Reconstructionists. Inherently, the conversation works its way back to road safety, and how not being safe when driving can negatively impact one’s life. I am frank in my discussions with our youth. I explain you are not immortal – this is done through files I have investigated where young people have died. I believe it hits home. My hope is they will remember our chat and think twice before picking up their phones when driving or getting behind the wheel when they have been drinking,” he says.
Over the last seven years, Cpl. Noon has been assigned 142 files, the bulk of which involved serious injury or fatal crashes. The ICARS team responds to an average of 250 calls for service each year. In 2020, there was a 27% increase in calls for service. In a paradoxical trend, due to COVID-19, traffic volume decreased for much of 2020 across North America but fatalities increased. Reports suggest that the average speed was higher due to the decrease in congestion, potentially resulting in more fatalities.
Whatever the data or trends, ICARS is at the forefront of the forensic investigation of collision fatalities in the Lower Mainland, providing a voice to the deceased and the truth to those left behind about what happened.
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