Operation “Take Back Our Highways”

Alabama will have 200 more state troopers on the road this week (August 13 – 17), activating a lot of officers for patrol duty who aren’t normally there. The stated purpose is to demonstrate to the bean counters that hiring more troopers will increase safety on Alabama highways.

Most marked cruisers are Ford Crown Victorias (above), but we’ve bought a few Dodge Chargers (below) recently too. For unmarkeds, watch for the aforementioned Crown Vic, the Ford Explorer, the Ford Expedition, and an occasional Ford F-150 SuperCrew, mostly in white, black, gray, or silver. I suppose they might have slipped a Charger or two in there too.

Watch for the dragnet. That’s when a single (unmarked) vehicle is running LIDAR (on the shoulder, under an overpass, or something similar), and radioing offenses and vehicle descriptions to cruisers further down the road, who are typically stacked on on-ramps.

I saw this a couple of years ago on I-65. There were two LIDAR operators, each in an unmarked Expedition: one under the 308 overpass pointed southbound, and one under the 304 overpass pointed northbound. The cruisers are stacked on the 308 southbound on-ramp, and on the 304 northbound on-ramp. We saw 18 cruisers in that four-mile stretch, about a third of them with “customers.” Based on my rough calculations, if each trooper writes a citation every 15 minutes, that operation was grossing about $7500 per hour.

Drive carefully!

Thanks to http://members.fortunecity.com/statepdcars/alabama.html for the images.

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