Police Beat by Tom Geyer

Illinois State Police from District 7 headquarters, East Moline, will hold a roadside safety check somewhere in Rock Island County the weekend of April 3.
It is not known where they will set up that weekend, or on what day. Of course, they’ll be looking for drunk drivers, people driving erratically, people driving without seatbelts, and those driving with suspended or revoked driver’s licenses.
Now, just about every weekend you can find at least one or two Illinois State troopers in down-town Rock Island. Sometimes they park at the foot of Centennial Bridge watching for speeders and erratic drivers, and sometimes they park about 1,000 feet from the bridge and use their LIDAR to nail speeders coming into Rock Island. (Yes, 15th Street is a state highway.) And then just when you think you’ve made it into the city undetected, they’re behind you with lights going.
Notice I said the police use LIDAR, not RADAR. Anyone spending money on an expensive radar detector for their car have simply taken their hard-earned money and slipped it into someone else’s pocket.
LIDAR stands for light detection and ranging. You can measure speed, distance, rotation, etc.
It is not a wide beam. It is a very thin beam of light. All an officer does is point it a something me-tallic on the car that reflects the light back to the LIDAR gun and boom. They’ve got ya. Since it’s such a thin beam instead of a wide beam, it has to hit your radar detector for it to produce an alert.
I got a lesson in this out at a speed trap Davenport was running last year on U.S. 61. The man they stopped was mad that the radar detector he had just bought did not alert him to the cops. He still had it on and one of the cops pointed the LIDAR at it. It would not stop beeping. He just turned it off and cursed. And he signed his ticket.
Will there be ways to defeat LIDAR? No doubt at some point, some smart person will find a way. Change and advances in technology are always occurring.
But until you get yourself some of that new technology, speed over the Centennial Bridge at your own risk. And don’t say nobody warned you.