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Apr 15, 2008 8:30 pm US/Eastern
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Tickets Tossed Because Of Illegal Radar Gun
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
Hundreds of speeding tickets are being thrown out because Pittsburgh Police officers used illegal radar guns.
The device needs to be approved by state law makers before it could be used on the streets, but that never happened.
Now, thousands of speeding tickets are under review.
LIDAR, a device that uses a light beam to detect speed very accurately, is the problem. The problem is, it's illegal and the bigger problem is police officers knew the device was illegal and they kept using it.
Many of the illegal tickets were written along a stretch of Route 65 near the West End Bridge.
Jeff Grasha got one of them.
"I asked them I said, 'What device did you use to time me?' and he said 'LIDAR' and I said 'Well, I don't think you're supposed to be using that,'" Grasha said.
Grasha's speeding ticket says LIDAR or light detection and ranging. It's a speed detection device not approved for any Pennsylvania law enforcement agency.
"The credibility of the police, I'm supposed to obey the laws and they're supposed to obviously enforce them and you would think that they would at least do it in a legitimate manner," Grasha said.
Turns out Pittsburgh motorcycle cops have been writing tickets using LIDAR since last October.
About 11,000 tickets in all, nearly 700 tickets with LIDAR alone making them null and void. The rest of the tickets listed legal speed detection devices.
It wasn't until we contacted Pittsburgh Police late last week that officers quit using LIDAR.
"At that time, the equipment was pulled; the officers were questioned on how many citations they have written and basically that's when it hit our screen that officers were illegally utilizing equipment," Chief Nate Harper said. "It wasn't authorized."
After police go through 11,000 tickets by hand, the department will send letters to everyone that got the bad tickets.
"We apologize to all the public for the inconvenience. LIDAR will no longer be utilized," Harper said.
Police say right now they believe about 700 tickets were handed out and immediately they will ask for them to be dismissed. They talked to lawyers who handle tickets legally they say this will lead to 11,000 tickets being contested.
The State Legislature would have to give legal approval for Pittsburgh Police or any agency to use LIDAR.
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