How Fast Was This Cop Going Down the Slide?

When crazy viral videos appear online with some physics content, it’s my sworn duty to analyze them. In this case, it’s this video showing a police officer going down a long slide and coming out the bottom with a surprisingly fast speed.

There are so many questions to consider here:

• How fast was he going at the bottom?
• What is the maximum speed for a frictionless slide?
• What’s the coefficient of friction in this situation?
• Why the heck did he go down the slide? Maybe it was on a dare or perhaps there was a criminal fleeing down the slide. Who knows.

OK, let’s get to this.

Video Analysis

There’s clearly a way to estimate the maximum sliding speed by looking at the slide, but let’s start with a simple video analysis. The video above doesn’t give the best viewing angle for analysis, but I’m going to try to get a value from it anyway.

Normally I would just load the video into my favorite analysis program (Tracker Video Analysis) and use some object to get a distance scale (like the length of the slide). From that, I could mark the location of the human in each frame…