Or, cop swaaying back and forth on feet peering down into construction site,blabbing with workers.

In Mass, people do not seem to care about taxes.

What part of the constitution does this not uphold? Or what law?

I agree with all the points Dynamic88 laid out…it’s a fairly clever program for understaffed/over-cruiser-ed precints. The only substantial worry here is that the legitimacy of roadside cruisers will fade, but as long as there is a significant concentration of manned roadside cruisers that will NOT happen.

Driving down 460 in VA a few years ago I pass a Trooper in the median and notice that he is slumped over the steering wheel. After debating with my conscience, I turn around, stop, walk up to the car and knock on the window, thinking that he is having a medical problem I am about to call 911, then I realize it is a dummy….
At least they could sit them upright!!

Also a point to make. What if, by your good Samaritanism, you were to be struck and killed by another motorist, or carjacked, or shot at? After all, who knows the neighborhood?

Could your wife sue the britches off of the city or county? In this case, I would hope she’d at least try to…

We will never know the cost. How many citizens lose a bit of respect for the law? What degree of their earnestness is lost among the populace? Who now thinks the ends justifies the means?

I think they cross the line when they add the dummy. A patrol car is a reminder, the dummy is a trick. When you have to fool a pedophile to catch him red handed, we understand that. When you want to enforce traffic laws, all you have to do is get out there and do it. The trickery is not necessary, only expedient (at least until someone wrecks while staring at the strange patrolman).

Wouldn’t it be better that law abiding folks, whose only likely interaction with the police will be when they hear one testify in court, don’t start to think the cops are tricksters and rogues? We only admire the clever detectives in fictional stories because the author first makes us believe in their moral good standing. The traffic dummy peels away that shiny veneer of white knight with a badge.

The costs are beyond any accounting, but our government seems to have once again lost the ideal that there are things so important that they can’t be described on a spreadsheet.

One day, I heard a story (unsubstantiated – no proof) involving the blow-up and the car that went something like…there was a woman who was being pursued, on foot, by a man. She saw the car and ran to it for protection/safety only to find the rubber Toots Lagoon in the driver’s seat.

Real or not, imagine the chagrin.

Um, gee. I don’t know. I guess the 16 year old criminal gets to test drive a much slower than expected Ford Crown Vic. Is roadside theft of patrol cars a big problem in Indiana?

DT

They quit leaving the keys in the empty cruiser ?

Fooled the first time, but I always look as I go past (usually dirty-like). And saw it was a freakin dummy!

Needless to say it didn’t take long for people to figure that one out.

But what else would you expect from Indiana State Patrol? Those guys are the worst I’ve EVER experienced. Patrol that 55 with an iron fist, and a ton of them.

How come the decoy doesn’t have a donut?

The cost is not worth the benefit.

How do we know this? What are the numbers? I immagine the cost is negligable. Couple gallons of gas to move the car around.

We probably aren’t going to get hard data on the number of speeders who’ve slowed down. Probably we’ll end up with the neighborhood watch group givinig general impressions. It’s hard to say whether the impressions are accurate or inaccurate.
People will of course assume accuracy or inaccuracy, depending on their POV.

Of course if the citizen radar gunners program gets going (the only part of this that I’m against) then hard numbers may be obtainable.

For anyone

It appears the real objection here is “trickery”. When the cops trick a scumbag paedophile into thinking he’s meeting a 13 year old girl for sex, no one objects to the “trickery”. Trick a motorist into behaving responsibly in a residential area, for all of 90 seconds, and suddenly we’re living in a (dummy) police state.

DT

Somehow I have ZERO problem with this pratice. It is rather effective and cost efficient. It is simply a reminder that the LAW is out there keeping an eye on what the drivers are doing on the the road. It does cause everyone to slow down but happy part of it is no gets a ticket!

I have to say I respect this practice, it is simple and fair. It is much better than HIDDEN COPS and speed traps that are strictly useful for revenue generation. The empty cruiser or dummy equiped cruiser does NOT dash out into traffic to case a speeder endangering me and my family. It does not write tickets that cost us a great deal of money and higher insurance. It DOES encourage public safety and get the point across to motorist with the least intrusive (PASSIVE)method.

Customers came to the office for training courses, and after a few days many would figure out the trick. Many would also start to question what kind of company would do that sort of thing. In the case of the company I was working for, it was a REALLY bad idea because as I soon found out, the guy I was working for was a cheat. The customers often started figuring it out before they even installed the system.

How bad of a cheat? The customers were car dealers, and most of them would happily call the guy all sorts of bad names. You guys call the car dealers a bunch of cheats and liars, well, they all thought this guy was over the top.

So ya, I think RF is correct. The police should be careful about being this clever. It’s one thing to use trickery to catch a felon, it’s another thing to use trickery like this. This sort of thing encourages deceitful behavior by taking the taboo away. The cost is not worth the benefit.

Who says there hasn’t been such training? How difficult is this? How about parking in the same spot where real cops park when they’re policing the area?

This is just scary. I’m all for neighborhoods doing there part to keep their own neighborhood safe. But there are waaaaay to many people with a chip on their shoulder. Putting a radar gun in their hands is a recipe for bad blood. Tickets for 1 mph over, anyone?

There actually should be training in where to position a police car, even with a dummy on board. A poorly placed smokey can cause accidents, if speeders slow down suddenly with a lot of traffic behind them in poor visibility.