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Guess My Speed and Give Me a Ticket, In Ohio
quall writes "The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that police may estimate your car's speed and issue a ticket if they believe you were speeding. The hearing threw out a radar gun as evidence because the officer was not qualified to use it, but apparently his guess was good enough. If you make your way into Ohio, I suggest driving 5mph under the speed limit because this leaves little room to dispute your ticket in court. The only chance you have is if the issuing officer decides to skip your hearing."
I wonder whether the court would also accept a driver's own GPS log as exculpatory evidence.
that most of the judge's wages are paid from speeding fines?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Look, just because there are no missing people, no unaccounted for deaths, or any evidence of any shape or form doesn't mean you didn't commit murder. I mean, you LOOK like a murderer. A trained police officer can't be wrong...
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Following the suspect with a certified speedometer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If he can't be trained to use a radar gun properly, then he's not qualified to guess what speed a vehicle is travelling...IMO.
It's doubtful that you could show an appropriate chain of evidence with the GPS. It's easily argued that you tampered with any such evidence.
Ticketing for illegal speeds is pretty easy, most people confess to it.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
"I was speeding."
"I saw you doing 80mph"
"Yes sir, that's about right. I'm sorry."
Voila, instant ticket for 80mph, and a confession to back it up.
I did the opposite. You never *KNOW* why the officer stops you. You may have been speeding. He may be pulling you over for a burned out taillight, or your vehicle may match a description of one seen at a crime scene, or it may even match the description of a vehicle from a missing persons case. Don't guess.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yeah, but back then speeding tickets were a) not very common (according to people who were driving then) b) rarely paid because hearings degenerated into a lot of "did not" - "did too" ing. (educated guess plus anecdotes) c) not very high (matter of public record)
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
Thanks but in light of this, I'll make a huge detour.
I'm from Ohio. I once got pulled over, and though I was speeding (and quite excessively), the officer didn't radar me. He wasn't legally allowed to write me a ticket for speeding so he just gave me a ticket for reckless operation. The speeding ticket would actually have been cheaper and put less points on my license. Bottom line: this doesn't change much.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Sometimes they are not set with their radar but a driver is going way too fast for the situation and the fact is obvious to any observer. Cops in motorbikes without radar come to mind, for example. They should have a way to ticket that driver. The problem, obviously, is the gray area. How fast is too fast? Is too fast if they estimate the driver is 50% faster than the limit?
Perhaps a common sense solution to that kind of situation would be just to stop the driver. The mere fact of stopping someone is usually deterrent enough; I know I don't want to be stopped by the cops even if they don't give me a ticket. I wonder if that would work for the general case?
Where I live, the cops can ticket a driver for driving negligently. That should be enough to cover the "too fast but no hard evidence" case.
It's doubtful that you could show an appropriate chain of evidence with the GPS. It's easily argued that you tampered with any such evidence.
Ticketing for illegal speeds is pretty easy, most people confess to it.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?" "I was speeding." "I saw you doing 80mph" "Yes sir, that's about right. I'm sorry."
Voila, instant ticket for 80mph, and a confession to back it up.
I did the opposite. You never *KNOW* why the officer stops you. You may have been speeding. He may be pulling you over for a burned out taillight, or your vehicle may match a description of one seen at a crime scene, or it may even match the description of a vehicle from a missing persons case. Don't guess.
Amen to that. Any conversation with a police officer should start with you saying "Evening officer, what seems to be the trouble?" - don't offer anything up, ever.
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In the UK, it used to involve two police officers.
One would drop their arm, raise a flag or some other indicator as a fast-looking vehicle passes...
The other would time how long it takes from the time that the first officer indicates to the time that the vehicle passes him. Since the two of them are a known distance apart, say 100 yards or so, it would be trivial to calculate the speed.
So if the driver was speeding or does something (braking like crazy to slow down) to raise reasonable suspicion, he'd be ticketed accordingly.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Or don't, and say you did.
Any conversation with a police officer should start with you saying "Evening officer, what seems to be the trouble?"
Unless it happens to be morning. Or early afternoon.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I have a good bit of family in law enforcement up in Illinois. This is SOP for officers up there. When they go through their training, speed estimation is one of the things they are taught, for things such as radar malfunctions and times where they are not in their car, (ie foot / bike / segway patrol). If they see somebody who "looks" like they are doing double the speed limit, based on the cars they are blowing by, then they can cite / arrest them on their powers of guesstimation alone. This has been around for awhile, but apparently only newsworthy until now.
Not saying I agree with the practice, but lets not blow this out of proportion as there is nothing new under the sun. Precedent shows that the officers word is statistically more "trusted" than yours by the judges, and thems the ropes, folks. Sigh...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
If some car ZOOMS by it's pretty easy for me to tell its speeding, radar gun or not (I'm not a police officer). If you have even a modicum of experience driving and you can't estimate whether or not a car is speeding you should probably have your driver's license taken away.
If you're talking about someone doing 50 in a 30, you're correct that it's pretty easy. But the difference between 60 and 70 isn't as obvious as you may think. Calling it accurately, and consistently? BS. That's why they have Radar and LiDar and all their other toys, so they can catch the minor offenders as well.
Not just $50, that is the immediate cost. Don't forget the $200 increase in your mandatory auto insurance for the next 3 years.
So much for a fair trial.
So by now, who hasnt wiped their ass off with the bill of rights?
In Ohio the officers might not be trained to operate the Bill of Rights...
That's the point of establishing a evidentiary foundation. You testify under oath as to: 1) Here's the process by how I acquired it; and 2) the printout is a fair and accurate representation of the data contained in my GPS log. While it may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that's the basic gist of it. Most judges I've appeared before were rather lax with evidentiary issues.
If the cop wants to challenge the validity of it, he can certainly do that on cross examination - or even voir dire before the logs are admitted as evidence. I would be amazed though, if the cop knew enough law to be able to effectively challenge its admission.
Unfortunately, and this goes back to the earlier post about videoing police during official stops, the old school judges seem to have a presumption in favor of police, so its an uphill battle regardless. Your closing argument would have to be along the lines of: a) I like cops; b) they're good for society; c) they would never intentionally lie and mistakes are rare, BUT THEY DO HAPPEN; etc...
The above, while it is general legal information, does not constitute legal advice. No one should rely upon the above statements and no attorney-client relationship has been established thereby. If you have been charged with a crime, you should immediately consult a local attorney.
We still have that in Ohio, but it's a little more high tech. It involves a helicopter and painted lines at certain distances on the road. (The helicopter makes it more high tech.)
Though, this isn't what the story is about. I can't believe the SC voted it a valid technique. Now we have to have our lawyers figure out if a police officer is properly trained to issue tickets by guessing... I'm hoping there's a way to overturn this decision. (Yes, I'm claiming ignorance on how my government works in this regard.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?
Well if I didn't know any better, and thought there was no way to measure velocity prior to the invention of radar, I might do as you have invited me to do and imagine that they just guessed and that this was good enough.
But since I do know better, I don't have to imagine. What they actually did was to time how long it took you to go between two points of known separation. Amazing, eh?
Even as late as the 90s some officers preferred this method, and sometimes near speed traps in the city you could see the markings on the curb that they drew. When it was explained to me by an officer, I believe he said the preference stemmed from when radar guns were new and tickets based on radar guns were being challenged successfully, while the stopwatch measurement of a trained officer was more likely to be believed by the judge.
In any event, "guess" was never the proper method.
The enemies of Democracy are
There is some hope of maintaining independent calibration of the radar gun, your jolly officers can increase the apparent speed by standing a little closer together or using a quick thumb on the clock.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I still like to say "evening." Keeps them on their toes.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
There's a law against waiting till the cop is walking to your car, then put it in reverse, crank the wheel, floor it and flatten the crooked bastard, as well. The same sort of problem cropped up in Louisiana. Cops were targeting out of state tags and towing cars to impound for further inspection, even if you were speeding. Then you pay inflated rates for impound and your belongings were probably stolen and there would never be an investigation. So don't defend yourself against tyranny and injustice from crooked law enforcement by killing as many of the cockroaches as you can.
That would be illegal. But then so is jaywalking.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Ohio now allows police to guess whether or not pregnant mothers are carrying human offspring, or an animal hybrid. http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/03/1422213/OH-Senate-Passes-Bill-Banning-Human-Animal-Hybrids In cases where animal hybrids are suspected, the Ohio police are to issue a ticket immediately.
So since you use a powerful, bold disclaimer, if you accidentally omit it sometime, does your previous use of the disclaimer then imply that you are giving legal advice when you omit it?
Or is it so much puffery?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Meow also works.
It's not analogous to condemning a person for "looking wrong". It's eyewitness testimony as evidence of a person's actions: "It looked like you were speeding" is analogous to "It looked like you stabbed that guy". Yes, eyewitness judgment can be wrong, but eyewitness judgment is not the same as "you look evil therefore you are guilty".
"You look like a murderer" is more analogous to "you look like a speeder". It is quite different from "it looked like you were speeding", and has nothing to do with the case being discussed here.
I was written a ticket by a detective one morning. It was for 4mph over the limit. There was no traffic on the 5 lane road and I was in a business suit. After he left, I realized he had written the ticket to me, but was for a Ford Mustang. I drive a Dodge Charger.
So the court date rolled around and I showed up in court. The DA comes over and asks if I want to plead it down to an equipment violation. I tell him that wouldn't be legal as I didn't have any equipment violations and the detective wrote the ticket to the wrong type of vehicle.
The DA walks over to the detective and proceeds to have him write me a new ticket, making the change to the type of vehicle to reflect what I was driving. This was after the DA looked up my DMV records to find the correct type of vehicle.
We go in front of the judge and I have to question the detective. I ask him if he used a radar gun to clock me, which he didn't. I asked him if he was qualified to write tickets based on "pacing". He wasn't. I asked him if he knew how far down the road in either direction the speed limits changed. He didn't. This was relevant because I had just entered a 45 mph area from a 55 mph area.
The judge got tired of me reaming the detective and says "I really don't care what evidence you have, you're paying for the ticket. Dismissed." That was the end of that. Traffic court is a joke.
You're right. Next time I'm stopped, I'll confess to speeding, running a stop sign last week, and the fact that there are 5 kilos of heroin in the trunk next to the dead hooker.
No, hold on. How about I let him tell me why he's pulling me over, and I'll graciously accept the ticket for the burned out taillight.
(Just kidding about the contents of my trunk. I promise.)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm starting to think that forcing the accused (in either civil or criminal proceedings) (and later found blameless) to pay for their defense and/or court appearance is a terrible injustice within our society.
Oh, no, don't worry - vehicular law has a get-out-of-jail-free card (pun soundly intended) in that, because automobile operation and licencing are a regulated activity, your rights don't extend to cover it. Hence why RIDE programs are legal, hence why so-called 'routine' traffic stops are legal. It's a nice grey area that your local cops live to bask in.
By my experience you don't get to see any information on the radar until you show up to contest your ticket. At which point so much time has passed that you can't really be sure that the allegation hasn't been tampered with anyways.
...
Nonetheless fighting speeding tickets isn't that hard. In all my years of driving I have been issued tickets twice. Both times I went to court at the appointed time to contest the charge (two different counties of the same state, a few years apart). Both times because my record was clean I was offered a plea bargain - with "probationary" terms where they agreed not to report the violation as long as I was not pulled over in their county again for X number of months (or years I don't remember now). Either way I paid the plea bargain fine (one case lower another case higher than the citation) and was not pulled over again in the issuing county. For that matter, one of those counties I have never returned to since
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I recently fought a speeding ticket in BC. I went to court, was prepared with radar gun manuals and specs, what I thought was the regulations regarding calibration and many other defences.
They were all struck down. Things that i learned:
- going down a hill, moving with the flow of traffic, not enough posted signs, and many other "commonly accepted" defences were explicitly stated by the judge as not holding any water.
- The police officer does NOT have to prove that the gun was calibrated in any way. His word that it was calibrated was "good enough" in the judges view.
- Police are trained to make a visual inspection of the speed. They MUST make a guess at your speed in their head before firing off the laser or radar gun. Their experience in estimating speed is treated the same as laser evidence.
- there is no "paper trail" on the gun, and they do not have to prove that the gun registered a certain number.
- the judge makes or breaks your case. its pretty much the whim of the judge whether you will get off on a technicality or not.
- bring some sort of previous case law that backs you up. I tried hard to find some relevant stuff, but obviously did not try hard enough.
So I lost, but it was fun actually, going through the motions.
Another thing i should say is that i was simply unlucky in the end. There were approximately 20 people there in the court fighting tickets, and 10 of them got to go scott free as their respective cops didnt even show up. No show = automatic win if you show up. So it is worth fighting every ticket and pleading not guilty, at least initally. Just dont expect to win if the cop shows up.
Just my 0.2 cents as I just did this a few weeks ago in BC canada. ymmv.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
My uncle got a ticket for a speed higher than he was traveling, and the officer testified in court that speed was determined by time over distance between two very close markers. The officer thought the closer his markers, the more accurate the measurement. My uncle, a professor, tried to explain that human timing error meant that the closer the markers were, the LESS accurate the speed measurement was. The judge didn't understand, was frustrated, and finally said he thought my uncle was a speeder, and let the fine stand.
More than that: in another appeals case (Warning: PDF) in the State of Ohio (coincidence?), GPS evidence presented by the defendant was specifically and intentionally disregarded by the appellate judge. Apparently, GPS wasn't precise enough (average speed over an interval instead of instantaneous speed), and the appellant's use of supporting evidence downloaded from the Internet didn't help. (Protip: Wikipedia is not admissible in any court of law.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Which, of course, requires visually estimating that your speed is approximately equal to that of the target vehicle.
Telling whether or not an object is getting closer to you is not very difficult. It's an ability that evolved in animals several million years ago.
Before radar guns, the police generally had to match your speed over 1/4 mile to issue a speeding ticket.
Needless to say, a lot fewer speeding tickets were written. The radar gun's debut in the 70s led to the exact same discussion we're having now with red light cams. They actually made the roads less safe, but they were a revenue godsend, so they became the norm.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I recall reading a book about how to beat speeding tickets. Assuming you'd disposed of the radar evidence (officer improperly trained, device not calibrated recently - works about half the time, if you know what to ask) you get the officer to demonstrate his prowess in estimating speed. Almost NO ONE is good at this. The example used was dropping a pencil from shoulder height. The usual estimates were between 40 and 60 MPH; in actuality, it's less than 20. Before radar, they typically had to pace you, time you on a marked bit of road, or use VASCAR (yes, I'm that old) Guessing wasn't considered evidence.
I used to be a cop and I did a LOT of traffic stops. In training and certification to use a radar gun they train you to look at the vehicle whose speed you're going to measure and make an estimate of their speed before using the radar, then compare the results. This was a practice in Washington state but I would not be surprised if it is common everywhere. After a while you get very good at estimating speeds and find yourself generally guessing the correct speed +/- 1 MPH. When you write your subsequent traffic stop summary you include a sentence stating that your observed a vehicle that appeared to be speeding and your visual estimation followed by the radar measured speed. This gets the officer trained to look at what's being measured rather than just sitting there with the radar pointed back over his shoulder waiting for something fast to come through which then builds credible speed estimation and descrimination into his testimony and also gets past the problem of accidentally radaring the Cesna 150 that flew overhead at 80 mph while erroneously attaching that speed to grandma who was doing the speed limit. In short, anybody who does a lot of anything reasonably well gets good at it - cops do a lot of speed estimation and get good at it.
I once got a speeding ticket for 10mph above 45 limit. The officer had "estimated" my speed. When I challenged him in court, he presented a training certificate, certifying that he could estimate speed with some ridiculous accuracy (forgot the actual number, maybe within 3mph).
A similar situation happened to me in Missouri. I was going at a good clip on a short road, and I got onto the highway before they could get the radar gun out. Eventually they pulled me over (I was going exactly the speed limit at that moment), and issued me a ticket for *exceeded* the speed limit. I asked what my supposed speed was when I broke the limit, and they said that only applied if you are *exceeding* the speed limit. So they didnt list my speed, just that I had broken the posted limit.
I'm not sure what the difference was, but I had my lawyer fix it anyway.
Best to preempt any questions with "I'll bet you $50 you're going to give me a ticket"
IIRC, the timestamps on New York Throughway tickets have been used to give people tickets before. I.e., you entered here, you left there, it took you so much time, bingo, average speed. Probably the same in other states. That's why I always planned my trips to include lunch or dinner stops on the throughway. I could do 80 and still average out to 55.
There really is nothing new in this story. Police are trained to estimate speeds. If they write a ticket based on that, you are likely to get the benefit of the doubt as to just how fast you were going, but not a cancellation of the ticket.
Wow. I know that it's fairly common to scream 1984 here but this time I gotta point to Brazil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKcMDFKSLcI
What part of "Don't admit to knowing anything" is confusing you. If you tell them the time of day, they'll know that you know. Now they have the upper hand!
This is a great intro to why you should never talk to police. You have to show ID but you do not have to answer any questions /. story awhile back and bookmarked it because it is valid and useful.
Got this link off another
Never talk to Police
In a nut shell, the police will take what ever you say and use it against you.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There is a law against this, and it's one of the laws of physics.
I see no problem letting them guess my speed as long as they make an *educated* guess. I'm sure most of them have degrees in physics or mathematics anyway. They're probably just working temporarily as cops because they're in-between university research projects. They'll probably be using this equation: Vxf = xi + Vxi(t)
There's no such thing as instantaneous speed. Velocity is always distance over time. If time is zero, that's a divide by zero.
You didn't do well in calculus, did you?
The Minneapolis suburb of Edina is fairly notorious for speed enforcement.
Now I recognize that law enforcement is not a for-profit business (on paper at least...) but given the limited resources available for law enforcement and the unlimited amount of crime there's still a cost-benefit argument to make.
What often amazes me, though, is seeing them occasionally use up to *five* squad cars at a time. It gets me wondering how much money its costing them relative to how much they make back in fines.
Because they are a wealthy suburb, they have pretty state of the art squad cars. Assuming a fully equipped squad car runs about $75,000 including everything stuffed inside (from emergency gear & weapons in the trunk to lights, sirens, and other upgrades or add-ons), five cars on the side of the road is a $375,000 capital asset not to mention 5 police officers @ $100/hour each or whatever it costs the city in salary, benefits and overhead to employ them.
You could be looking at $1000/hour to run that speed trap in men and equipment without coming nearly that close to writing enough tickets to pay for it.
Zero of course....it's the starting point!
The initial velocity (Vxi) is much more interesting to determine (but it wouldn't be that hard). You'd also have to add any acceleration that might occur: + (Ax)(t^2)
Neither is, with some training, estimating approximate speeds for a narrow class of objects (e.g., "cars") under very specific situations (e.g., "being observed from rest from the roadside"). Surprisingly enough, its fairly common for traffic police to be trained in that skill.
Further, where its relevant to a case (whether or not its a speeding case) anyone can testify to a visual estimate of speed in court; of course, any party hurt by such testimony is free to try to get the trier of fact -- judge or jury depending on whether its a bench or jury trial -- to give less weight to that testimony based on the witness's lack of training and expertise, but the evidence is generally admissable.
Roughly stated, speed traps and red light cameras cause people to slam on their brakes, which more than one study has shown causes the very accidents they're hoping to avoid.
The other big point of discussion used to be that when you need to find a cop, they shouldn't be hidden from view. Speed traps raise tons of revenue, but they make society as a whole less safe by leeching police presence and resources away from attending to actual crime and accidents.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
(Speed traps || Red Light cameras) are about raising revenue, not enforcing the law. They actually make driving less safe by causing drivers to slam on their brakes at unexpected times. They engender contempt for the law by making law enforcement about revenue generation and bill collection, not serving the public.
But yes, I'm in total agreement that red light cameras are a far more egregious case, though I would argue that radar speed traps paved the way for them, in the same way that red light cameras will pave the way for in-car black-box gps monitoring, where all apparent violations will be billed automatically to your credit card.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Instantaneous velocity = lim(distance/time) as time-->0
Or, more succinctly, ds/dt - the derivative of distance with respect to time.
When you do show up in court with your GPS log, tell the judge that the GPS log is generally easy to verify if it has been falsified. Ask them to give it to their computer science guy to look for any signs of tampering. The record of the sattelite locations, the time of day, the locations, the time stamps, speed time distance, etc will provide evidence of tampering. Point out that a forgery is very hard to make with all those factors in place. It is up to them to prove their case against you. It is up to them to prove any errors in your GPS log.
Be sure to point out the number of satelites in the sky at the time of the stop, the margin of error, the base accuracy, the DOD calibration is monitored 24/7, etc. If the mobile is out of cal, it is out of sync and would not provide a valid fix. A valid fix is confirmation of calibration. If they doubt your statement of certification, ask them to verify it with the DOD and device manufacture. The base accuracy is generally +/- 1 on the LSD or 0.1 MPH. It does not have the parallax error of the officer's radar which you question to the max at this point along with the radar's known error modes, including mirrors, angle, angle correction, etc. It's your certification against their's and your operator skill against theirs.
You can show much more margin of error in both operator and equipment setup and calibration than they can show in your GPS log. Unless the judge is crooked or a technophobe, the GPS record is hard to discredit.
The truth shall set you free!
That was pretty much the way it went with a traffic stop with me several years ago. I was scooting down a large road in a convertible with the top down. I saw him on his motorcycle going the other way, and didn't think anything of it. I ended up stuck in the middle of a large clusterfuck of cars, where a few roads merged. I heard the siren behind me, so I pulled over.
The conversation went pretty much the same. After asking me twice, he told me, "you're really making me mad. I'm going to walk away and come back, and you'd better tell me what I expect to hear." When he came back, I said the same thing, "No sir, I don't know why you stopped me.".
He had me get out of the car, patted me down, and told me I was going to jail. That's odd, since I still didn't know why he stopped me.
He believed I was speeding when he saw me a few minutes earlier. Well, his words were "you were passing the other cars like they were standing still." Since I wouldn't confess to anything, and he had nothing to prove his statement, he gave up. We ended up having a nice polite chat after that.
It's a lot easier for them if you just confess to whatever. "Oh ya, I must have been speeding, and I was following that car too closely." Great, 2 tickets with no proof.
Part of a traffic stop is high visibility. When the police have someone on the side of the road, it makes everyone slow down to the speed limit. By spending an extra 5 minutes with me stopped, even without a ticket, it brought the flow of traffic down to the legal limits.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Neither is, with some training, estimating approximate speeds for a narrow class of objects (e.g., "cars") under very specific situations (e.g., "being observed from rest from the roadside"). Surprisingly enough, its fairly common for traffic police to be trained in that skill.
Just like arson forensic investigators?
http://search1.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=114005470
In that case, an innocent person was put to death because being 'trained in that skill' usually means the older guy saying 'Yeah, the new guy can do this.'
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
That there is economy in running a helicopter to enforce speed limits is testament to US law enforcement's preference for bringing in revenue rather than acting as a deterrent.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
This whole story is strange. Courts have always recognized that Cops can ticket you based on "passing markers"--yes they need only count off the seconds between those little reflectors on the side of the road.
This is considered indisputable if the officer has passed a certification test.
Officers will routinely write, "passing markers" because its subjects them to the least review by the courts.
Other backwards ideas: if Cops use 'stationary radar' they need to do a bunch of work to ascertain whether it is working correctly--it takes two patrol units: the stationary one and the reference vehicle. But, none of this is necessary if they use moving radar!
But moving radar is next to meaningless (cosin error) without careful regulation of the setting which is only required... for stationary radar.
Otherwise, areas begin to build real budgets based on projections and become dependent upon that income.
Yeah, the village of Linndale (an inner ring Cleveland suburb) is a classic example. At one point fully 60% of their village budget came from a speedtrap they ran on I71, the village officers had to exit their jurisdiction to even get onto the highway!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It isn't a valid question, judges in Ohio get a salary that is paid no matter how many tickets are issued or not. They do not get commissions or anything of the sort. It may be that the fund the actual salary comes from is supplied or supplemented by citations, but it wouldn't effect their salary or benefits if no citations or twice as many was ever processed.
That's why I always say "evening", no matter the time of day!
Back in the mid 80's, MP's at Ft Drum NY were sent through the state radar cert course. The first half of the course was classroom; the rest was spent estimating vehicle speeds while the instructors made their own estimate & held the radar gun. You could not be certified unless you could accurately guess vehicle speeds within one mph (multiple vehicle types in different busy speed zones; two tests while stationary and driving). Your turn in the hot-seat for the actual test was about two hours total, *constantly* estimating vehicle speeds within 1 mph. I can't recall how often you had to re-test to maintain your cert, but most MP's were only there for a year back then and no-one had to re-test while I was there.
It was surprisingly easy to accurately guess vehicle speeds with just a little practice and training, no math involved. Like most any learned skill, the more you do it, the easier it gets. But learned skills are also perishable, so you have to use it or lose it. There is no "trick" to it. Just take in the scene and observe the vehicle of interest moving compared to landmarks, road markings, etc.
Tickets were written based primarily upon our "visual speed estimate", which in turn was supported by radar. Actually, once certified, your visual speed estimate alone was sufficient to support the ticket. As I recall, there was no speeding fine until you were at least 7mph over and the PMO at Ft Drum set policy to warn until 10mph over, unless it was a hazard zone (school, construction, etc). So, FWIW...
No, its just that that particular post got rather specific.
The arguments against this aren't that it isn't possible to estimate a vehicle's speed. The problem is that's infinitely easier for the Cop to be a dick and screw you over even if you *weren't* speeding at all.
Ability to challenge your accuser in court and all that. If a Cop 'felt' you were speeding, how exactly do you defend yourself against that?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Two problems with this
How often are the officers re-certified?
Who keeps the officers accountable? One person's word alone doesn't prove anything. I don't care that it is a police officer, they are people just like the rest of us. They have bad days, prejudices, just don't like some people etc...
Yeah Sure.