CHP Speed Patrols to Soon Use Less Identifiable Cars

In a major change from its long-standing policy of deploying highly identifiable patrol cars, the California Highway Patrol will temporarily use 15 cars that lack the usual white-and-black paint scheme to crack down on speeding truck and bus drivers, the agency said Monday.

The cars--including four-door-sedans and two-door coupes--are being repainted various shades of red, blue, green and other non-traditional colors. They will be on patrol--probably on Interstate 5 in the San Joaquin Valley and on Interstates 5 and 10 in the Los Angeles and San Bernardino area--beginning Jan. 12, the CHP said.

The 15 “alternately marked patrol cars,” all driven by uniformed officers, will carry the 18-inch CHP shield on both the driver’s and passenger’s side doors, but will not have emergency lights on the roof or amber lights on the rear shelf, a CHP official said. Also missing will be the vertical dashboard mounts for shotguns, sometimes visible at night by speeding drivers.

Instead, officers will have a small red light that can be plugged in above the windshield when making a traffic stop, said Lt. Pete Mader of the CHP’s legislative liaison office in Sacramento. Shotguns will be stored under the front seats, he added.

The change in profile is part of a one-year pilot program approved by the Legislature to crack down on commercial vehicles, both trucks and buses, being driven recklessly or at excessive speeds, the lieutenant said.

But officers in the vehicles will not be enforcing traffic laws selectively, he added.

“We’re not going to tell officers to ignore someone drunk in front of them in a private vehicle or somebody driving by them at 100 m.p.h.,” Mader said. “Nor will they ignore accident calls, people broken down by the roadside, or calls to assist other officers. But the main enforcement emphasis is going to be on trucks and other heavy vehicles, like buses.”

The precise disposition of the 15 vehicles is still being studied, but it is likely they will be allocated to only four of the CHP’s eight geographic divisions and “sprinkled down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles and out Interstate 10 into San Bernardino County,” Mader said.

Emphasis on Trucking

CHP spokeswoman Susan Cowan-Scott described the roads as “highways with heavy truck traffic and a significant truck accident rate.”

The program was approved by the Legislature earlier this year. The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), is an attempt to “find a way to slow them (truck drivers) down,” the senator said last August, shortly before it became law.

In pushing his measure, Seymour argued that some big-rig drivers, with citizens band radios and extended views from high up in their cabs, were virtually defying speed limits.

“It’s not a fair game anymore,” he said. “They know where Smokey (the CHP) is all the time.”

Seymour’s legislation allows the CHP to temporarily deploy a maximum of 15 such vehicles--there are more than 2,200 cars in the CHP fleet--as an experiment to see whether bus and truck-related accidents can be reduced.

Change in Tradition

State law has, for decades, mandated the use of clearly marked black-and-white patrol cars by officers of the CHP and other agencies enforcing traffic regulations, Mader said.

Although some truck drivers opposed the measure, the California Trucking Assn., which represents truck owners, supported it as preferable to other truck-safety bills that called for stricter enforcement and tighter controls on overweight vehicles.

The use of less obviously marked patrol cars puts California somewhat at variance with the practice in neighboring states.

Nevada Highway Patrol officers do not use unmarked cars for routine traffic enforcement, according to Sgt. John Harney, an administrative services officer at the patrol office in Las Vegas.

He said the state’s highway patrol cars are painted silver and blue, with a star on the side and the words “Highway Patrol” on the back. While most of the cars have light bars on the roof, some supervisors’ cars do not have them.

Policy in Arizona

Claudia Baca, a duty officer with the Arizona Department of Public Safety in Phoenix, said that department’s highway patrol has never used unmarked cars for traffic enforcement.

“All our cars are white, with a star on the side and the words ‘Highway Patrol’ on the back,” she said. “That’s so people can identify them as police officers.”

Mader said CHP officials are concerned that the officers and their cars remain identifiable, at least from close up.

“We don’t want a situation where other people can pose as highway patrol officers,” he said.

That concern, he said, should be alleviated through the use of the CHP insignia on the doors and uniformed officers.

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this article.