Utility guys were actually police
<p>Coeur d’Alene Police officer Nick Knoll uses a LIDAR to detect the speed of oncoming vehicles on Third Street in downtown Coeur d’Alene on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Coeur d'Alene Police officer Spencer Mortensen looks at a license and issues a warning to a driver for going above the speed limit on 3rd street in downtown Coeur d'Alene on Wednesday.</p>
<p>A Coeur d'Alene Police cruiser turns down Third street to issue a warning to a driver for going above the speed limit during a speed reduction effort put on by Coeur d'Alene Police's Community Action Reduction Education and Community Action Teams on Wednesday.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE — Depending how fast you were driving down Third Street Wednesday morning, the two men you zipped past in a 10-foot high aerial bucket probably looked like utility workers.
They weren’t. They’re employed by the Coeur d’Alene Police Department, and boy, did they have their eyes on you.
From his aerial post on Foster Street, Officer Nick Knoll had his laser-based LIDAR gun pointed at downtown-bound motorists. Information about speeders who exceeded the 30 mph limit was relayed to officers three blocks down the road, who doled out warnings or tickets.
The seven-officer operation was part of an effort to reduce speeding in that part of town, an exercise which lasted from 9 a.m. to noon. The officers made 44 stops and wrote five speeding tickets in those three hours. Four seat belt tickets and three no-insurance tickets were also doled out.
As part of its Community Accident Reduction Education program, the Coeur d'Alene Police Department chooses a complaint-driven area to conduct its traffic-slowing operations while collecting data.
"We get complaints about certain areas, and we go out there to check if it's as bad as the complaints say," Knoll said. "We're seeing if all the complaints are justified."
Knoll said pointing a LIDAR gun down toward the traffic is better than doing it from an idle police car.
"You have to find a place to park and things can obscruct (the LIDAR's laser) from giving an accurate reading," he said. "There's a better line of sight (from above)."
On-foot officers were on each side of Third Street and waved cars down for traffic stops. Between the utility truck, orange cones and reflective vests the officers wore, CPD wanted to give the appearance of a work-zone so drivers would slow down.
From Oct. 11 to Oct. 19, a Coeur d'Alene Police Department radar tracked speed from the same 30 mph section of town. According to Sgt. Erik Turrell, 45 percent of traffic was scanned at 31 to 35 mph and 11.6 percent were between 36 and 40 mph.
"We found that the speeding problem here wasn't as bad as once thought," Turrell said. "It tells us that the vehicles are speeding there, but it's not excessive."