Device watches for fast drivers
A little technology may help the Grovetown Department of Public Safety keep speeding from being a problem.
Grovetown Public Safety Officer Robert Eastman sets up a radar trailer. The trailer was purchased with a $5,000 grant.
Photo by Jim Blaylock
The department recently received a $5,000 grant from the Governor's Office on Highway Safety as part of Operation Safe Streets with which they purchased a radar trailer. The trailer, which arrived in mid-November, can measure the speed of passing vehicles from as far as a mile away, department Capt. Gary Owens said.
"The main focus of that trailer is totally to let the offender driver or the habitual speeder know (they are speeding)," Owens said. "Maybe it will build a pattern and (speeders) will say, 'My goodness I am speeding every morning. I didn't realize I was doing 45 through here every morning.' Our main goal is to slow that speeder down."
Speeding is not a problem in Grovetown, Owens said.
But, the trailer was put into use Thursday as random points throughout Grovetown hopefully to let habitual speeders know their speeding pattern and slow it down, Owens said.
"This is just things for community policing that we like," Owens said. "We do not have a lot of trouble out of speeders. We are more of a pro-active police department than a reactive police department. We are both. But we would rather be pro-active which means taking care of business before something goes wrong."
The trailer is not an enforcement tool, Owens said. More equipment can be purchased enabling it to photograph the driver's area and tag of speeding vehicles to search for the driver and mail them a speeding citation.
"If it could do that, we could get rid of road patrol," Owens joked.
In reality, the trailer records how many vehicles passed by during a set amount of time and the number of those vehicles that were speeding.
The department is scouting new sites for the trailer in the area so residents can see it and know it is being used. After that, it will be moved to highly congested areas and probably in the school zone around the new Grovetown Middle School when it opens in January, Owens said.