Posted on 09/10/2001 2:23:26 AM PDT by 2Trievers
Editorial: Radar love -- and hate / Pennyslvanians simply don't trust their local police
Monday, September 10, 2001
Tina Turner famously sang of her small hometown in Tennessee that visitors had to beware: Nutbush City Limits, where "25 was the speed limit, motorcycle not allowed in it." Because Pennsylvania has its share of Nutbushes, each with its own little police department on the lookout for speeders, a legislative committee last week heard testimony on a proposed bill that probably isn't going anywhere fast.
Unique among the states, Pennsylvania allows only the State Police to use hand-held radar to catch motorists exceeding the speed limit, leaving local departments to resort to other methods to calculate a driver's speed, including the use of the timing device known as VASCAR (visual average speed computer and recorder).
Many Pennsylvanians don't trust local police to use radar strictly as a means to ensure safety: They think it will be used as a revenue source. This is more than paranoia, because some police departments have become notorious for their enforcement of speed limits -- locally, you just have to ask drivers on Route 65 what they think of the officers from Kilbuck.
Because legislators don't want to pass laws that offend the voters, the issue of hand-held radar for all police departments has been back-burnered for decades. The latest proposal won't necessarily go anywhere either, but it won't be for lack of sweeteners.
The draft legislation that the House Transportation Committee considered last week contains several brakes on possible abuse. In working with officials from local-government and police-chief groups, state Rep. Dennis E. Leh, a Republican from Berks County, drafted a compromise statute that balances public concern with the practical needs of enforcement.
Among the restrictions proposed, speeding drivers caught via radar would not get points on their record unless they exceeded the speed limit by more than 26 mph; official warning signs would have to be erected on highways and the location of the radar would have to be readily visible to the motorists; and only full-time officers could operate the devices.
Moreover, at least in the first five years of the program, if the primary use of radar could be demonstrated as a revenue-raising tactic, motorists could cite this in their defense.
Such reasonable protections ought to be enough to move this legislation along. The fact is that a fundamental absurdity rests at the center of the public prejudice against hand-held radar, even if a few local police departments have abused their current powers.
Nobody seriously argues that local police should be not armed; if we routinely trust them with actual guns, why not hand-held radar guns?
The adage "speed kills" has not been overturned. While no motorist wants to get a ticket, it makes no sense to have a policy that is implicitly meant to discourage enforcement by making the job harder for local officers. Provided that proper safeguards are put in place to curb the would-be Nutbushes of Pennsylvania, it's only logical to provide local officers with radar.
Ya' think?
Say what?! Well, maybe not in an election year, anyway...
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