The Good Cop/Bad Cop Simulation:

Pick an Officer

Procedure:

1. You will make measurements for each of the first 5 officers - ignore the last three. Also, ignore the "publish to global view" button.

2. Make measurements at 30,60 and 90 mph. Every time you click on speed (e.g. 60 mph) you will get a readout of what the officer actually measured (even though the true velocity is always the selected speed - 60 mph in this case).

3. Each officer has a radar gun that has a different amount of random and systematic error. You will therefore need to run several trials per officer and record (and submit) all of your data.

4. From your data that you just took, answer the following questions: (note it may help to average your data and to also note how much variation around the data exists for each officer)

   a) Who is the bad cop - this is the one which would have the highest systematic error. How do you know this from your data?

   b) Which cop is the good cop and has no systematic error.? Again, how do you know this from your data?

   c) Which cop has the largest random error associated with their detector.? Again, how do you know this from your data.

   d) Now set the speed to 90 mph and run 10 trials per officer. Your goal is to write a ticket but the rules say you can only write a ticket if you register a speed greater than 10% of the speed limit (that would be 99 mph in this case). For each officer, how many tickets did they write? For those officers that wrote zero tickets, explain why they were unable to register a speeder.

   d) If you get to issue a ticket for measured speeds in excess of 15% of the speed limit (in the case of 60 mph this would be 69 mph), which cop will write the most number of tickets and which cop will write the least tickets.