 Hi, I'm Raquel Lopez with the Media Relations Unit Denver Police. I'm here today interviewing Lieutenant Rob Brock on hit-and-run accidents. Sir, can you tell us how you investigate hit-and-run accidents? Certainly. Normally, a call comes into our unit of a serious injury or fatal accident and it involves a hit-and-run vehicle. Our detectives respond to the scene and the first thing that they attempt to assess is the description of the vehicle, the description of the driver and which direction that that vehicle fled. They begin to conduct their investigation looking at all of the physical evidence on the roadway. If they are able to, they will find pieces of the vehicle that are present there. They may be able to confirm license plate numbers with witnesses. A lot of people have cell phones now that they take pictures of these incidents with. And we also avail ourselves of the plethora of video cameras that are on businesses and schools and all kinds of government institutions. Once we gather all of that information and we begin to build a profile on the vehicle that we're looking for, that's our first goal is to find that vehicle and to hopefully then find the person that was driving it. Oftentimes, it winds up being the owner of the vehicle who was the person who was driving during the incident. However, sometimes people loan their vehicles out and it's somebody else, but it's somebody that's known to them. And we will begin to follow up on those leads, talking to witnesses, interviewing folks. And oftentimes, after consulting with the media and putting that information out, people begin to develop a guilty conscience. We've had a number of people who've come forward and admitted that they were involved in these incidents. Last year alone, we had three or four people that showed up at police stations and said, I'm the person you're looking for. Those are the kind of incidents that, I mean, that's the way we like to see them be resolved as the person comes forward and takes responsibility. But oftentimes, we're left with the task of tracking these folks down. And so if it's a serious incident where we have a fatality or a serious bodily injury, we will bring in additional detectives to work the case. It's really critical that we get moving on these cases within the first two or three days and that we get that information out there so that individuals don't have time to try to either have their vehicle repaired or to try to hide the vehicle. But we have had several situations where we have been able to solve these hit and runs much later down the road when they've attempted to repair vehicles. We've still been able to solve these by working with auto body companies, by working with our forensics crime lab. Because you can clean a car, you can repair a car, but you cannot get rid of all of the forensic evidence that exists on it. And so in short, we go after the vehicle first and then we look for the driver. Hopefully we find them both at the same time. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes folks come back to the scene. We've had people who have actually come back and watched the investigation occur and officers have been able to notice them and catch them at that time. So a wide variety of ways of approaching the investigation, but the first steps is collecting the evidence because all of the work that the detectives do on the roadway, collecting evidence, documenting it with our forensic mapping system and digitally photographing and sometimes videotaping the incident, helps us to prepare it for court later on. Thank you. That was Lieutenant Rob Rock from the Traffic Investigations Unit. I'm Raquel Lopez. Stay tuned for updates on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.