The UK government has made a £2.7 million deal that will help equip 27 of England's police forces with 3D laser scanners from Leica, designed to speed up the process of clearing motorways after crashes. The technology works by making a 3D image of the crash scene, allowing police investigators to view it remotely rather than manually logging information at the site itself. This investigation process currently results in motorways being closed for an average of six hours after a serious crash, but the laser scanners should reduce this by 39 minutes on average. The scanners are mounted on tripods, and take around four minutes to deliver a 360° image of the scene containing over 30 million data points, with resolution down to the millimeter. It's similar technology to that employed by road mapping services such as NAVTEQ, though this implementation scans from a stationary position. While the investment was first proposed this summer, the finalized deal means that police forces will start to receive their grants in January 2012, with the money going towards 37 scanners in total.