A 17 year old boy in California got a ticket for going 62 miles per hour in a 45 miles per hour zone. The officer clocked him with a radar gun. End of story, right? Well, it turns out that the boy’s father is a retired law enforcement officer himself and he had installed a GPS tracking device that measured the boy’s speed every 30 seconds and emailed dad if the boy was speeding. The retired sheriff’s deputy downloaded the log from the GPS device for the time and location at which the boy was alleged to have been going 17 miles over the speed limit and lo and behold it looks like the radar gun was wrong! This article discusses this case and the fact that all over the world people are challenging radar gun readings and speeding tickets based on the GPS devices in their cars that say otherwise.
Of course, the police are sticking to their guns (pun intended) and saying that the hand-held doppler radar gun the officer was using is more accurate than the fixed satellite parked in geosynchronous orbit. I think that is highly doubtful, but the question it raises is that one of these technologies is way wrong. I see this happen in Kansas DUI cases, too. A person will blow one number on a PBT and then blow into an Intoxilyzer 30 minutes later and blow a totally different number – one not explainable by the mere passage of time. One of these technologies is clearly wrong in that situation.
This speeding ticket challenge will be an interesting case to watch. The courts of Kansas, and probably every other state, have declared that radar gun technology is reliable. Almost no one challenges a speeding ticket because a person’s word against the police machine is not usually enough to cast doubt on the radar result. Technology, though, is putting power into the people’s hands and I expect we will see a lot more of these technology wars in the future.