Is it legal for law enforcemen officers to park on private property to

In many places you can have the PO set up one of these readout signs to raise awareness in a particular area. I've also seen where a resident worked to have the county install a permanent readout sign like this just outside her driveway. It is solar powered and will show your speed as you are approaching the sign. If you are going over the limit it starts flashing at you (we call it the "angry sign").

Nope, entrapment requires that the officer actively influence someone to commit the infraction. Sitting in a cop car hiding from view is a form of passive observation.

I *love* those signs, they tickle me pink! 55, 65, 17 (there's me!) hehe. They always been accurate when I've gone by too, or else they and my bike computer are off by the same amount

I agree with the others that said if you don't want speeding tickets to stop speeding and that driveway doesn't always equal "hidden". Actually, I figure if your driveway is so hidden that a cop car can't be seen (at least at the end you pull out of), it doesn't sound like a very safe driveway! I personally would probably frame a speeding ticket if I got one, but I'm too wussy to go downhill that fast where there are cross streets!

Most of the cops are good people but like everyone else a few rotten ones slip in. I wouldn't mind one sitting in my driveway because people drive very dangerously on the road out front. One cop stopped DH for a light out and big mouth that DH has he told him~"Hey, if you guys really want to make some money on speeders just sit on ----- between 7 am & 9 am and you will have plenty." A month or so later the same cop sees us, pulls us over to tell DH that they did sit on that road at those times and arrested quite a few people! Yikes! I've known of 2-3 smart mouth cops and they must have been really bad because they weren't cops for very long. One guy came up to my house all smart mouth asking if we'd seen anyone hanging around our neighbor's house. No, no one who is not there a lot. He got really snarky and almost accused us of stealing his missing tools then switched and said "Good thing for you we think it was an inside job for the insurance." A couple of months later we heard where he got tossed off the force. Yes, it was the neighbor himself needing the insurance money so we heard.

I would serve coffee, donuts, cold drinks, whatever if we had some police protection on our road. Some days it isn't safe to go to the mailbox! Our road is a short cut to the local high school. We see coons, cats, dogs and all kinds of animals killed by speeders. Unfortunately, most of the speeders we see are young boys in pick-ups. We have had several wrecks with serious, one even with fatal injuries due to speeding. Hate to see these kids get hurt!

Lynne,
Two days ago a cop car was hit in Jackson,Ms. A truck had lost a boat on the highway. A cop stopped his car in the right lane before the boat and put his lights on to warn drivers. A mercedes came flying up and hit the cop car which burst into flames. Cop escaped with a few burns, driver of mercedes escaped with even fewer burns but will have several tickets to pay.

Because sitting on little roads and such defeats the whole purpose - revenue generation. They need to get on the big divided highways and other roads with artificially low speed limits where they can pull people over. It is there that they can generate the ticket money. Plus you have those nice speed traps in places that are huge revenue generators especially for smaller towns and counties.

Also you have to remember that for law enforcement traffic stops are just the beginning. From there they can begin the game of 20 questions. They can trick you into giving up your rights, trick you letting them paw through your vehicle and do all sorts of things. One of the things that needs to be done in drivers education classes is for kids to be taught what their rights are when dealing with the police. While they're getting their MADD and DARE brain washing they should be required to sit and watch "BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters" They're going to be growing up in a police state so they had better learn to deal with it's enforcers.

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Respect The Cactus!

Nope, just didn't get into the rest of the story. I'll skip the middle of the story and tell the end. He's a school custodian now.

__________________
Robin

me either

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http://lownfamilymaplesyrup.com/ max@lownfamilymaplesyrup.com
Professional Tool. 1220 Woodmere Ave,Traverse City, MI. 49686. 231-941-8003. http://professionaltool.com/

they hide because they arent interested in slowing speeders. By hiding they can make money. If they are out in the open people will slow down, and the cops wont make as much money.

__________________
http://lownfamilymaplesyrup.com/ max@lownfamilymaplesyrup.com
Professional Tool. 1220 Woodmere Ave,Traverse City, MI. 49686. 231-941-8003. http://professionaltool.com/

So he got promoted for incompetence????
That hardly seems fair..a school custodian is a much better job.

A cop car in plain view only slows people down when it's there. One that occasionally hides in a certain area makes people slow down all the time because they never know if he's there or not. It's a much more efficient use of resources.

You're absolutely right about that. Kind of away from the topic of the thread, but I just wanted to re-emphasize the point that you need to know your rights and exercise them. As a law enforcement officer myself, it makes me sick the way some cops illegally coerce people to let them search their vehicles on a minor traffic violation. It happened to me once and I got one of the cops fired and the other suspended without pay for 3 weeks and required to take a refresher course on probable cause and unlawful search and seizure...the funny thing was, I taught the course. Bottom line, know your rights and file complaints (and lawsuits if necessary) if they are violated.

Cops don't make the laws, they just enforce them. They don't set the speed limits, and with a very few exceptions most of the officers I used to work with hated working traffic. And no one I know ever thought of working traffic as bringing in money, since the departments see very little of it. In fact one department I worked for finally had to institute a rule that you had to write at least one traffic ticket every shift you worked because no one was writing any! (At the time a white supremcy group was circulating a flier about how easy it was to kill cops during traffic stops... no wonder officers weren't too interested in working traffic.)

Sometimes when you see officers setting on the side of the road - you might think they are working traffic - and they might have their radar on - but they are really trying desperately to catch up on their reports. So unless someone comes flying by and the radar really starts "singing" they aren't even going to look up.

A lot of departments have a citizen ride-along progam and I would stongly encourage people to take advantage of it. Might give you a little better veiw of how things work.

Those signs are great, that lets me know if my speedometer is off.