“Ghost” Cop Cars Help Snag Bad Drivers

Officer Bryan McGinnis (pictured) swung his new black car onto North Main Street. Within seconds a driver behind him turned on his high beams.

McGinnis stayed the speed limit. So the driver behind him hit his horn, gesturing to let him go by. It didn’t work.

Finally, the driver tried to pass McGinnis on the left but there were cars coming in the opposite direction. At this point, McGinnis slid his police car to the side of the road. As soon as the driver passed him, he put on his flashing lights and siren and pulled the driver over.

It was about 5:30 a.m.

“The driver never thought I was driving a police car,” McGinnis said as he recounted the experience. ​“He was not expecting to see a cop.”

The reason? This cop car doesn’t look like one. It is all black and while it says ​“Branford Police” on the side, its letters are shadowy, ghostlike, and hardly visible when the car is in motion. First you see it, and then you don’t.

McGinnis gave the driver a ticket for aggressive driving and following too close.

Did the driver have anything to say?

“Yes,” said McGinnis. ​“He said two things. The first was that he was late to work, and the second was that I was driving too slowly.” The speed limit is 40 miles per hour.

Branford is the first town in the state to use state-of-the art stealth vehicles. One is a 2011 Ford Taurus, the one McGinnis drives. The other is a 2010 Ford Explorer SUV, the one that Officer Rich Kenney, Jr. (pictured) drives.

The purpose of the stealth cars is to target aggressive and distracted drivers because they cause frequent traffic accidents. How one drives reflects the habits and conduct of the driver. In this day of multi-tasking at any time or any place, these habits have led to reckless conduct. In a 24 – 7 society, where speed is part of the culture, a well-marked black and white police car allows the errant driver to put the cellphone down or conceal it. 

But not with these two stealth cars.

Officer Kenney, a 20-year-veteran, was the first Branford cop in a stealth vehicle in 2010. Officer McGinnis, who retired from the Orange police department after 20 years on the job, joined the Branford police department nearly three years ago. He and his Ford Taurus hit the road last month. Both he and Kenney also use police motorcycles, (Harley’s), regular bicycles and, sometimes, the black-and-white police vehicles. 

In the last year, Kenney and McGinnis, who are assigned to a newly created traffic squad, have made 3,000 traffic stops and issued more than 2,700 citations.

Not everyone gets a ticket. For example, the other day, when Kenney was in the SUV at a gasoline station on Cedar Street, a van blew through a red light despite the warning not to turn. Kenney put the SUV in motion, and before you could say ​“go,” he was flying onto I‑95 South, siren blaring, lights flashing. Kenney stopped the driver.

Turned out he was a New Haven fireman late for the job. Kenney looks at his identification and gave him a pass. 

The two top violations are for driving with a hand-held cellphone and running red lights. Connecticut permits cellphones to be used in cars as long as they are not hand-held. Violators pay $100 a ticket; that number goes up for each repeat offense. There are many of those, both Kenney and McGinnis said.

The other top traffic violations are running red lights, ignoring stop signs, following too close and making illegal lane changes.

Police Chief John DeCarlo said Officers Kenney and McGinnis are directed to the ​“hot spots” in town, which are determined by weekly vehicle crash statistics and caller information. The underlying premise of the program is to get drivers to change their behavior, to think twice before getting another ticket. ​“Our stealth vehicles allow officers to target this behavior,” DeCarlo said.

In recent weeks we drove with each officer to see how the program operates. Each officer is in a high-tech car that contains radar, lasers, a noise meter, a tint meter and soon, a spot for a laptop, which will help free up the dispatcher’s line. 

The officers have had a number of memorable traffic encounters. Officer Kenney recalled the 48-year-old woman who was driving her car without her hands on the wheel, all the while multitasking. She used her knees to guide her car, held her cell phone against her left shoulder to talk and used her right hand to put on her mascara. This was her routine. She did it every day. She was also a repeat offender.

Motorcycle riders can be stopped for loudness violations, especially in the summer when they tend to be on the road more. One day Officer Kenney stopped a motorcycle rider who had one hand on the handlebars and other holding his cell phone. 

All encounters between the police and an errant driver are videotaped and recorded both for their own protection and to set the record straight if the driver makes erroneous charges against the police officer. Both officers wear a View‑U device on their shirts that enables them to video and audio record their encounter with the driver. Videotaping an event is perhaps the single most important tool the cops have to resolve subsequent disputes, but not every department has them.
 
Officer Kenney two weeks ago stopped a woman for a cellphone violation. ​“I was very polite to her. It was actually her second cell phone offense. The next day she came in to the police station and wanted to talk to the sergeant. She was trying to get out of the ticket. ​‘That officer was very rude to me. He wasn’t very professional,’ she told the sergeant. So the sergeant says, ​‘I will review the videotape. Everything is recorded,’ he told the woman. ​‘I will check it out.’

“At that moment, she retreated. ​‘Well,’ she says, ​‘he wasn’t that rude.’ She decided not to pursue it.”

Back at the station, a sergeant will tell an irate driver, ​“I don’t know if you are aware of it or not but your entire stop was videotaped,” McGinnis said. All the videos are placed on a computer and are available by date. ​“So the sergeant might say, I have reviewed the audio and video and what you are telling me is not the case here. So what do you want to do now?” 

The View‑U device also has the effect of calming down the driver. Officer McGinnis said ​“Once the driver sees the eye looking at them, their demeanor changes and they are not as aggressive as they might be. They know it is a video. This has saved Rick and me on several occasions. It is great to have. The clarity and the sound are amazing. I want the driver to know about the camera, to see its green eye. It helps us.” 

Officer McGinnis stopped two cars during the hour we were with him. He gave each driver a $100 ticket. One driver was on her cellphone when she left the Stop ​‘N’ Shop area. He follower her, put on his lights and siren and she pulled over across the street from the ​“Y.”

He has a routine from which he does not deviate. Before he leaves the Taurus, he gives the dispatcher a description of the vehicle, the plate number and a description of the driver. He explains: ​“Only because… Godforbid if something should happen to me while I am up at that car, they will know, even if the plate doesn’t match, the dispatcher will have the description of the vehicle and the occupants. Then they know what they are looking for. From day 1 this has been my routine.”

When he approached the car, Officer McGinnis asked the driver: ​“Do you know why you are being stopped?” This driver said ​‘Yes. I was on my cellphone.’” He then returned to the Taurus, filled out the paper work, waited for a report on her license.

One learns a lot from a license plate check. Was the car stolen? No. Were there any warrants outstanding for the driver? Was the license suspended? If so, the driver cannot use her car. Is she on probation? Is the driver a registered sex offender? Is there a restraining order against the driver?

Typically errant drivers just pay the fine. There is an incentive to do so because if the driver admits to the offense and sends in the fine, no points are assessed against the driver’s license. ​“That is a huge thing to people,” McGinnis said. This driver’s license is clean.

He returned to the car to hand her the ticket. The four small children in the back seat want to know all about him, the driver said. They were a little nervous, she reported, but she said he was very nice and was just doing his job. 

Next we drive to at a corner on Damascus Road, not far from the Walsh Intermediate School. Within minutes a woman whizzed through a stop sign. She didn’t even slow down. ​“We are in a school area with school buses,” he said. 

“That was just bad, she went right through,” he said. Within seconds his lights were flashing and the siren was ringing. He stopped the car at Damascus and Christopher Roads. He called in the specifics, as he had with the previous car. ​“She said she didn’t know why she was being stopped,” he said when he returned to the Taurus to write up the ticket. Going through a stop sign costs $125.

The idea is that after the first ticket drivers will think twice next time — -that the hefty ticket will help change behavior. ​“We want them to say to themselves, I am not going to roll thru the stop sign or go thru the red light or I am going to watch my speedometer and stay off the phone and not text and not be distracted. The texting and cell phones… that is huge. It is all day,” McGinnis said.

Kenney echoed his thoughts. 

What baffles both officers is how easy it is to comply with the law and still use your cellphone. ​“You can get a hands free device. It is cheap. Or a speaker phone and open it up and talk. They are cheap simple solutions versus a $100.00 ticket for your first offense, or a $150.00 next time and then a $200.00 ticket,” McGinnis said.

“It doesn’t make sense. People choose not to and take their chances. They probably think when they see a marked police car that they can identify right away. ​‘I have time to put the phone down.’ But somebody like myself in this type of car, I will be right next to them.”

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