Is this common?

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quiettype

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Last night while driving home in northeastern PA,on rt.11 I passed by a state cop that had a pickup pulled over.Then about a mile further another cop sitting off the road.About a mile later,another cop sitting? This was out in the middle of nowhere where any LE presence is unusual.
My impression was they that were hunting as a group.Is this common? Have you ever seen this tactic being used? Thanks
 
Police sometimes saturate an area .I don't know how effective it is.I've seen it for drunk driving campaigns .I've also seen it where there is radar and 6 chase cars ,the state has to get some money !
 
Here in Michigan some of us refer to them as "wolf packs". On cops sits
under an over pass or behind a sign with a radar gun or laser gun and radio's
to a group of Cops sitting a mile or so down the road. Then they pick of the
speeder and give him a ticket.

The largest group I've ever seen is 8 cops waiting for the radar cop to tell
them who to pick up. One group had state cops, local cops and County
cops in it.
 
im not a leo but i always understood it as having more than one car in each area so if things went downhill the officer would have backup immediately available.
 
If it's that many officers in area where you usually don't see any, more than likely what happened is they got a complaint from somewhere about speeding on the road. Like from a citizen complaining, or some traffic analyst somewhere determined that the road was having an unusually high # of accidents, something like that, and it was a detail in response to it.
 
Yes it is common for State troopers to do that around here, I have been driving delivery for the last 10 years and if I go thru a trap, I alway look for #2 between 1 to 10 miles down the road. I do not alway find one but many time they are there.

Where abouts on Rt11, above Danville or below
 
Was the president or some other official visiting, I've seen LEO's line the route, one car on every bridge and overpass Etc.
 
How does this work in terms of a speeding ticket? I was under the impression that the ticketing officer had to show you evidence of your speed, by means of the readout on a radar gun or whatever. If another officer is issuing the ticket, further up the road, how can he provide such evidence?

(Please forgive my ignorance - I've never had a speeding ticket in the US, so I don't know the technicalities of these things.)
 
Quiettype...

I see this all the time in the tri-state area. If it was fairly early, before midnight, it was probably just a speed trap. If it was the wee hours of the morning then they may have been getting started on setting up a combination of speed trap & sobriety checkpoint roadblock.
 
Preacherman, I can't speak for LA but in Tx. we are not required to show the radar reading. Here we can and do work off "good faith" from any other LEO's word that said violation occurred. Each state has its own "Code of Criminal Procedure" and some vary quite a bit.

There are many different reasons why LEO's will "stage" in certain areas, as specified above. There are times when we need several to be staged in a certain area and times when its appropriate to only have one or two, depends what type of operation you are working.

Good Luck
 
There has also been a full-scale manhunt just North of there, mostly in NY; escaped con shot a trooper in a traffic stop a few days ago. They haven't found him yet.


Trickiest multiple-car trap I've seen was a marked Sheriff's car just cruising at the limit, and, of course, slowing down everyone behind him. He eventually pulled off the highway; an impatient kid behind him waited a few seconds, and floored it; and a half-mile down the road the kid was collecting his paper work from another deputy in an unmarked car.
 
I saw a gaggle of 7 NJ troopers last week on a state highway. I thought there was a donut sale someplace but the next day's newspaper said they were cracking down on seatbelt violations.
 
What they do in Connecticut for speed enforcement is have different units performing diffirent functions. One unit will do the radar, and another will be positioned elsewhere to pull over identified (suspected) offenders.
 
Highways

Around here, they've been runnin' a decoy for about a year. First radio car is in plain sight. Everybody hits their brakes...then hammer it when they figure they're past him and out of range. Maybe a half-mile or so. Just around the next bend or over the next rise while they're still watchin' the rear-view mirror...SMILE! You're on candid camera!":D
 
My first day at UND, when my parents were helping me move in, we drove across the Columbia Ave bridge over Demers Ave. Sitting at the base of the (steep) bridge was a police car. One hundred yards farther along two more cars were pulled over in the turn off lane.

It warmed my heart to see three of Grand Forks finest (paid for by my tax dollars) hard at work generating more revenue for the city, instead of say, patrolling for real criminal activity. Esp by a steep bridge where it is tricky to avoid creeping over the limit.
 
In western states, especially California, in daylight, that kind of behavior often means there is an aircraft spotting for the ground units.

Nothing to worry about, they only chew on volunteers. :D
 
I find speed enforement to be a type of tax collection. If everyone drove at the speed limit, the gridlock on the roads and the loss of time due to more time en route would be substantial...and the earnings of the police department would be more dependant on their negotiated contract. In my opinion, speed enforcement is both disingenuous and costly in terms of the loss of goodwill of the population.
 
Here they tend to set the radar car up on an overpass over the interstate. The others, when not out on the road, are parked in a loose line along the on-ramp, which hides them from the traffic being checked.

For awhile, they were putting a trooper at the rail on the overpass without the vehicle, presumably because the vehicle's outline gave it away.

We do enjoy our little games.
 
Police Revenue

As most here know, the police receive none of the revenue from traffic citations. These monies go into a "general fund" of the city, county, state, depending on the agency.

The police do not set the "Speed" or traffic laws of a given city, county, or state, the legislature does. If we have a problem with these laws or how they are enforced then we should appeal to our "elected officials", since they ultimately "carry the ball". This is why our Democratic system of government and criminal justice system works the way it does (good or bad).

Oh, and "by the way", there is "No Such Thing" as a "Ticket Quota", this has been illegal since before I became a LEO 20+ years ago.
Good Luck
 
During my stint as a non-sworn type working in a university department it was said many time that there is a very high negative correlation between valid enforcement of moving violations and the injury and property damage rates within the jurisdiction. I never saw data or hard statistics but the idea makes sense: penalizing a behavior will drive down both the frequency of that behavior and its results.

PoPo22, distribution of fine revenue varies by location. A friend made the jump from non-sworn to sworn status when a federal grant brought a radar gun into the department. My friend was told flatly that his new position would vanish at the end of the grant period if he did not generate enough "activity". It was a forgone conclusion that bogus cites would not be tolerated.

Our usual response to the accusation that we were filling quotas was "Quotas? No, we have no quotas: we get to write as many tickets as we want!" We could stay so busy writing valid cites that the question of bogus tickets was not an issue. Devoting too much time to any one aspect of the job was quickly addressed by supervisors.
 
When I drove down to Ft. Benning from Chicago in '80 to go to the Infantry Officer's Basic Course, the AL Highway Patrol(?) cars used to lie in wait in groups of four, under highway overpasses. I saw this in at least two instances.
 
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