'Speed guns don't work,' says police superintendent clocked driving at 79mph

Our police superintendents don't look like Helen Chamberlain!

dobs108

Yea lets all use that excuse and see how far it gets use. :razz

I wonder why the complaint about accuracy wasn't brought up before it involved once of the enforcers. Surely her own force has ticketed numerous motorists using the same "defective" equipment.

Oh and I agree with dobs108

Does any reconize the lidar unit in the picture?
I guess it only matters if thats the unit that was even used in the first place.

And I thought that she looks exactly like Ray Kelly of the NYPD

I can attest to the fact that the laser technology works and has been court tested before, at least in the US. It is interesting that the photo show the unit registering 79. I wonder if they record all of their traffic enforcement actions ???

in an unfortunate fatal accident. A civilian was killed.

The officer claimed he was traveling at the speed limit.

But the AVL network we had sold to them claimed he was travelling at 160 kph in an 80 zone - the officer swore he was driving the limit, that the system was wrong and thus he was not responsible.

The local integrator kept badgering me to put it in writing that the speed readings must have been anomalous - I simply pointed out that while a single reading might have been out of line, the reality was that the officer took 'N' seconds to get between between any 2 non-adjacent sample points and that every pair indicated that he was speeding and thus was not anomalous, since if it took him 6 minutes to travel 16 km, he must have been averaging 160.

The police union, which previously was quite gung-ho about the system because it had successfully been used to rescue officers in trouble by way of the panic buttons we'd put in each patrol vehicle (as a sub-function of the data network and dispatch software we'd provided) became rather less enthusiastic.

Then again, they told me when I was down under for the first time that I would not be able to drive because I like to drive 'American style' (which is slightly over the posted speed limit).

Last week I went by one of those portable speed reminder signs... this one said, "Speed Limit 25 mph... Your speed:" and it's flashing 29 at me for a few seconds before it corrected itself to 23 mph. Nobody else around. Only problem was, I was going 23 mph the whole time I was within its line-of-sight. A couple of hours later I passed by it again and this time the reading it gave matched up with my speedometer, so it wasn't an issue of a general lack of calibration, or one device or the other being way off the mark. I remember thinking I was very glad there wasn't some kind of automated enforcement attached to it.

Maybe it is device specific. I can't believe all portable radars are defective. Do they go through regular quality checks?

When I use my GPS, the speed it tells me I'm traveling differs from vehicle to vehicle. I'm never sure what to believe, my speedometer, the GPS, or a combination of both. This got me to wondering what a radar gun would tell me my speed is. If there are 3 different readings, which one is correct?

In the case of driving a few miles over the speed limit, who cares? I don't think most officers would pull people over if it's within 5 MPH. But if you're going well over the speed limit, there's no question that the law is being broken, and it doesn't matter if it's precisely accurate. Maybe what law enforcement officials should do is use more than one method, like what bramfrank mentioned.

Under one of the pictures it said:

"If Superintendent Chamberlain wins, it could open the floodgates to thousands of appeals from motorists who have been caught using speed guns."

So Police have caught motorists using speed guns? I wonder where motorists bought these speed guns that Police caught them using.. and would the arresting charge be: "Unauthorized use of a speed gun"? Of course, a interesting question then would be: "Why would the average non-Police person want to own a speed gun in the first place?"

Hmmm..

Nuvi1300WTGPS