Various Traffic Stop Issues

Most of us have been stopped by a police officer at some point, usually for a minor infraction like speeding or an expired registration. And of course, all of us have seen movie and TV depictions of the cop who is stoic but unfailingly polite as he hands out a $200 ticket. But anyone who follows the news knows that such stops can sometimes be fraught with peril for the police officer or state trooper -- because they never know when a seemingly routine traffic stop could lead to trouble, or even violence.

So we talked to one retired state trooper to get a better sense of what actually happens at a traffic stop from the cop's point of view -- "the anatomy of a traffic stop," if you will. The retired Nevada state trooper we spoke to spent 12 years patrolling the highways leading in and out of Las Vegas, which, granted, is a more "colorful" city than most -- but the basics are the same, he said.

"The first thing you always take into consideration is your own safety and the safety of the driver," said the retired trooper, who asked that we not use his real name, so we'll call him Greg. "So you always want to pick a spot to pull the driver over that is safe for both of you. You don't want to be exposed to traffic rushing by in the right-hand lane, and you definitely don't want to pull a driver over on an overpass, because if a passing car drifts out of his lane, the only way you can escape being hit is jumping over the railing and falling 30 feet. "So you always want to pick a safe spot if you can, but it doesn't always happen that way -- you can't always control where a person pulls over," Greg observes.

The second thing that is ever-present in the cop's mind is to be looking for any suspicious movements on the part of the driver -- "whether they're just acting weird," cautions the retired trooper. "Like, if it looks like they are stuffing something under the seat -- or even worse, reaching for something under the seat."

This sense of being ever-vigilant isn't exactly apprehension, says Greg. "It's more just an awareness and being alert ... a survival instinct." Sometimes, the method of approaching the car just depends on the police officer's instincts, says Greg. "As you approach the driver, you keep looking, keep being aware, and if you get a weird instinctive feeling that this could be more than a routine stop, you approach them from the passenger door, just for safety's sake. Although, this way is more difficult, because you're farther away from the driver, and have to reach into the vehicle when he or she hands you their license, registration, etc."

But one common rule always stood -- "You never go past the B post," asserts the retired trooper -- that is, the pillar behind the front door that separates the front seat from the back seat. "You want to stay slightly behind the driver, otherwise you become a big open target if they have violent intentions."

The potential for a harrowing experience occurs when the cop returns to his vehicle and runs the driver's license and plate number through the system -- and gets a "felony tone" beeping through his radio, meaning, the driver has an outstanding felony warrant. "If this is a bad guy, we immediately get the 'felony tone,' and the dispatcher starts dispatching back-up units before they even start talking to us."

That's when things can get exciting -- or as the case may be, dangerous. "If we get a felony tone, we generally wait for backup," explains Greg. "And when the second officer arrives, you approach the car with your guns drawn, pull them out of the car, search the vehicle, handcuff them and take them in. Because if someone has a felony alert, you need to be prepared that they are ready and willing to break the law and maybe take you out." Only once in his career did a subject "get physical" with Greg. "I was arresting him, and he resisted, and started to turn around, like he was going to put up a fight. But I had 12 years of martial arts training before I became a trooper, so I just kept him spinning in the direction he was turning until I had his arms pinned and he was bent over the hood, and I cuffed him."

On other occasions, the retired trooper had to join in the chase when his dispatcher radioed ahead that an occupied stolen vehicle was coming his way. "Frequently, if a car thief knows he has multiple units in pursuit, he will get off the freeway and start driving through neighborhoods," says Greg wryly. "So he usually ends up blocking himself in by going down a one-way or dead-end street, and bails out of the car and starts running. That's when guys like me find themselves running through back yards and hopping fences, and the adrenaline really starts pumping."
Greg also recalls one high-speed, potentially dangerous incident. "I was out on the highway one night, when I got a call that there had been a drive-by shooting, and that the suspect was in a vehicle heading my way, and he had driven in and out of both Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, so he was being chased by units from both the Metro police force and the North Las Vegas department. So I see this long line of red and blue flashing lights coming at me -- there had to be 12 cars in pursuit -- and I asked my dispatcher, 'Do you really want me to get involved in this?'

"They said 'Yeah,' so I fell in behind the other units and we chased the guy to the Mesquite, right on the Arizona border, and he went down a one-way street, and the Mesquite cops put the spikes out, so his tires shredded and he was riding on rims by the time he came to a stop," relays the police officer. "And in no time, you had a dozen cops or more, out of their cars, fanned out in a circle, drawing their shotguns. It was an impressive display of efficiency and response, but nothing came of it, because the suspect had ditched the weapon -- so no shots were fired."

During his 12 years as a state trooper, Greg once had what at first looked like it might be a close call -- but in retrospect, is just fodder for an amusing story. "We were sitting on the side of the highway, my partner and I, running radar, and all of a sudden, this old pick up truck comes barreling down the road -- with no doors on it," says the police officer with a laugh. "Now, I don't know about every other state, but it's illegal in Nevada to be driving a vehicle with no doors. So we pulled him over, and the guy gets out of the truck, and I swear, it looked like he stepped out of 'Big Time Wrestling' -- he was huge, no neck, with the long hair you saw on pro wrestlers in the '70s and '80s.

"Now, it turned out he was a nice enough guy, so we just gave him a warning, and told him to put doors on his truck. But afterward, we were laughing -- because this guy could've ripped both our arms and legs off," says Greg with a rueful chuckle. "It would have taken both of us to get to the hospital -- one of us steering and the other one working the gas pedal and brake. "I mean, the guy was in violation of an ordinance, and we should have stopped him -- but we didn't expect him to look like a mountain."

SPEED TRAP WARNINGS
a) Good old-fashioned radar: old fashioned method of speed detection you know and hate
b) Laser Guns : same technology but more accurate
c) Aerial Detection : rare and easily noticeable way to catch you
d) Speed Cameras : The worst b/c you won't know you until you get your mail

Of course no one likes getting a speeding ticket, and who hasn't cried out, "You gotta be kidding me!" upon learning that a heavy foot just lightened your wallet by $150 or $200? But the sad truth is, the best way to avoid that kind of a bite is to just slow down, because police officers -- whether they be city cops, state troopers or county sheriff's deputies -- definitely have technology on their side. At this point in the history of highway driving, everyone knows that the most popular police speed traps employ good old-fashioned radar. In this scenario, of course, a police officer will stealthily park his or her police car out of the view of oncoming motorists, perhaps under an overpass, in a ditch in the middle of the freeway or behind a billboard. Then, the police officer will flip on a radar unit that transmits radio waves at particular frequencies. The waves bounce off the target, in this case, a car that the police officer thinks is speeding, and those waves are then picked up by a receiver. The shift in frequencies tells the police officer how fast the car is going.

In recent years, however, more and more police departments have been using laser guns, either in addition to or instead of radar. "We began using the laser guns about 10 years ago," says one former police officer from a Midwestern state, who asked that we not use his real name. We'll call him Jack. "They're actually more efficient than radar. The laser guns can pinpoint a specific car much more accurately," says Jack. The other advantage to using a laser gun is that the laser light can't be detected by those pricey radar detectors often used by drivers who would really rather speed with impunity -- or is that immunity?

One of the more sly methods that police officers use to detect hot-footing motorists is aerial detection. Typically, this is done by painting white lines at either end of a stretch of highway -- usually a quarter-mile or half-mile long. A police officer in a helicopter or plane will time how long it takes the driver to travel the distance between the lines. "That allows the spotter to calculate the driver's speed," says Jack. "He can then just call ahead to an officer in a patrol car on the ground that's another two or three miles down the highway, and tell him, 'green Taurus, left lane.'"

In another aerial speed-detection technique, the police officer simply does a visual estimate of the speed of the cars below, and compares it to the "ground speed" of the helicopter based on using visual targets along the highway. There is yet another method to catch speeders, and it doesn't require a police officer to be physically present at the speed trap location. Speed cameras are attached to lampposts or telephone poles and are programmed to snap photos of speeding vehicles. While speed cameras have been employed on a comparatively limited basis in the United States, they've been used more extensively in Europe, Canada and other parts of the world for more than 30 years, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

This method can deliver a delayed shock to the system of a speeder, since the driver isn't pulled over on the spot. He won't know that he's gotten a speeding ticket until he receives the eye-popping infraction notice in the mail. If you have a problem controlling your tongue in the presence of a police officer who has just written you a $200 speeding ticket, this ticketing system might be your favorite.

Sometimes, the best enforcement of speed limits is a not-so-subtle reminder in the form of the electronic speed boards you see alongside a highway that flash big, bright, white-hot numbers in your face to let you know how fast you're going. These boards also employ radar. "The radar unit sees the target, transmits the radio waves, they bounce back, and tell the drivers how fast they're going," says Jack. "We used to think of those speed boards as being more of an 'awareness program,' because they reminded people how fast they were going. A lot of drivers really don't know how fast they're going, so these speed boards essentially are a means of urging voluntary compliance."

And, according to Jack, that's the main point of enforcing speed limits via speed traps. While traffic fines do augment revenues for the city, state or country, that's not why speed traps are set up, says Jack. "That's a myth that we had quotas on how many traffic tickets we had to write in a single month. We just want people to obey the speed limit, because it's for their own safety," says Jack. "The main reason for setting up a speed trap, whether it's radar, laser or aerial monitoring, is simply to encourage voluntary compliance of the law," says Jack. "And we never cared if someone called in a radio station and says, 'Oh, there's a speed trap set up on such-and-such a road,' because it achieved the same result as a motorist seeing a cop writing someone a ticket. It got people to slow down."