Speed Trap Rabbit

Today I met a person who was in quite the ranting mood. Apparently, he had just gotten a speeding ticket, and his claim was that he wasn't speeding, he was the victim of entrapment.

From what I could gather from his vulgarity-laced diatribe, every traffic cop knows that people have a tendency to drive at the going rate of traffic, and if the majority of drivers are driving 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, soon everyone is driving 10 miles an hour over the speed limit - no one wants to be the one to hold up traffic.

He told me that in areas where speed limits change rather quickly, say from 45mph to 35mph, police have employed what are known as "rabbits" - a car that will continue to travel at least 5 to 10 mph above 45mph despite the decrease in the speed limit to 35mph, thus deceiving other drivers into believing that 5 to 10 mph over 45mph is the acceptable rate of travel

In rural areas, he said, it is something to be expected, but now he claimed it is a tactic being used in areas where smaller towns butt up against recent developments such as large shopping malls near highways (which was where we were - near the largest shopping mall in Colorado, and at the intersection of two major freeways)- the primary route people use to commute to the area will be a 65mph or 55mph zone, but once a driver exits that route the feeder route will have a greatly reduced speed.

He went on at great length about how the rabbit trap works best when the transition is via an off ramp or some other such egress that does not require coming to a full stop, as cops know that generally, if a driver makes a full stop he or she will look for a new speed limit sign and abide by it.

They also know, he continued to elaborate, that when a full stop is not required, a driver has a tendency to simply continue at the rate of speed they had been traveling, and if that rate of speed is reinforced by other drivers, they become almost blind to new limits even if a posted limit is passed.

Police officers, he stressed, are well aware of this, and they use the "rabbits" to lead drivers past where patrol cars will lay in wait, usually on the other side of a rise in the road where the view of a patrol car is limited. The rabbit car will pass the parked patrol car without slowing down, as brake lights would alert drivers that are following the rabbit of the higher rate of speed. 

Once a traffic cop has a victim (his actual words) exceeding the speed limit by at least 15mph (preferably a driver in a newer model vehicle, such as the one he was driving I assume), then the officer will pull over the victim and issue a ticket, with the rabbit long gone.

The raving and ranting guy said that the citizen getting the ticket is an ordinary law-abiding citizen who follows the law but becomes a victim of police entrapment, plain and simple.

I just nodded in agreement with him, hoping to myself that the lady with the four kids in line in front of me would not be ordering much more than hotdogs and cokes for her kids.