Faster than a speeding Lexus

If you search the Internet for radar detectors, you’ll find 11 million pages on these little devices that help speeders avoid traffic tickets.

None of them may thwart Chris Knox, a veteran radar cop on the Palos Verdes peninsula who is hunting for the lead-footed owners of sports cars and the absent-minded parent rushing the kids to a soccer game. There’s an excellent chance he’ll catch them, judging from the evening I recently spent on speed patrol with him.

On the winding roads overlooking the Pacific, the deputy sheriff is on his home turf. He knows every bend of the road, especially where motorists are likely to hit the gas. Hairpin turns and sections of rough pavement put a natural damper on speed; it’s the smooth straightaways that tease the heavy-footed.

He knows specific drivers and their cars. As dusk falls over the hills, he spots a Marymount College student in a compact sedan. “I’ve given him three tickets since last December,” Knox says. One ticket was for going 70 in a 45-mph zone on Hawthorne Boulevard.

This is police work at its most basic. Although many rookie cops are impatient to get off traffic patrol, Knox has been nabbing speeders for a decade.

“I know I can’t save the world, but I just want to do my part and get people to slow down,” Knox said, as he watched the radar returns from vehicles moving along Palos Verdes Drive South, where the speed limit is 35 mph. “People go 80 miles an hour around here. That’s why speed patrol is so important.

“When people ask me why aren’t you out arresting bad guys, I tell them this is more important than fighting crime.”

It almost goes without saying that the public view is quite different. The prevailing attitude toward speeding is similar to how people viewed drunk driving in the 1960s -- an accepted part of adult society.

Driving fast is glamorized in car ads, films, music, you name it. It’s a cultural shorthand for youth and cool.

But in real life, on the highway, cops like Knox try to hold the line, knowing that an estimated 13,700 Americans are killed each year in accidents that involve excessive speed.

Knox also knows the precise spots along the road where fatal accidents have occurred, where speeding cars have gone airborne, landed and burst into flames.

Knox’s specially equipped Crown Victoria, which is owned by the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, is equipped with the latest radar, a Kustom Pro-1000 that can measure the speed of vehicles while the patrol car is in motion or when it is stopped.

Unlike a hand-held radar gun, the unit has an antennae mounted on the side of the patrol car. It takes a fair amount of judgment and a lot of training to make sure exactly which car’s speed the system is reading when there are multiple vehicles on the road.

After 40 hours of radar instruction, in addition to basic traffic patrol training, Knox can launch into lengthy discussions of technical issues like cosign errors, weighting factors, shadow effects and a lot of other arcane stuff that comes up in court when speeders try to fight tickets. Habitual speeders are in a constant cat and mouse game with police. But Knox’s techniques can foil even the most sophisticated radar detector.

Most good traffic police can visually estimate the speed of a vehicle within a few miles per hour, even looking backward in a mirror. Knox doesn’t switch on his radar until he sees a speeding car; by then, it’s too late for a radar detector to give warning for a driver to slow down.

After 10 minutes of monitoring cars through his rear-view mirror, Knox spots a silver Lexus 430 going about 50 in a 35-mph zone. He switches on his radar and locks in the speed. With a blast of his siren, he pulls over the Lexus. The driver spends about five minutes looking for his license and then admits he doesn’t have it with him.

Knox takes a Visa card for identification and does a data check on the guy through the Department of Motor Vehicles, confirming he has a valid license. “Technically, I could arrest this guy for driving without a license,” Knox said. “But he lives just up the street and seems like a nice guy.”

Like most lawmen, Knox usually writes tickets only for drivers going well above the speed limit, although he doesn’t like to talk about those margins. In general, police don’t write tickets unless drivers are going at least 10 or 15 mph over the limit.

Such margins are important in winning convictions when tickets are contested, because the basic speed law under the California Vehicle Code is somewhat vague, stating: “No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent ...” The margins also give a break to people who stray a few miles over the limit.

Without being asked, Knox said, “I don’t have any quotas, but I am expected to write tickets.” On most days, he writes eight to 10 tickets. At that rate, you can surmise that he’s issuing more than 2,000 per year. It sounds like a lot, but that’s a drop in the bucket.

There were 1.5 million speeding convictions in 2005, according to the California DMV. In Los Angeles County, the Superior Court handled 1.7 million traffic tickets last year, which averages out to 1 for every 6 residents, including infants. Court officials said that nearly 400,000 of those were speeding tickets.

Along Palos Verde Drive South, Knox clocks a Chrysler Town and Country minivan doing 61 mph in a 45-mph zone. The driver fails to pull over immediately and eventually ends up in the middle of a busy grocery store parking lot. This leads Knox to place his hand on his gun as he walks up to the window, but it turns out the driver was simply confused about where to stop.

“My wife is going to kill me,” he tells Knox.

True, speeding tickets are expensive and can jack up insurance premiums.

But for months after a traffic citation, research shows, drivers are statistically much less likely to die in a crash, because tickets make motorists cautious behind the wheel.

Although they are bitter pills, tickets do save lives.