[VIDEO] Can Radar Pick My Speed Out of a Group?

I get this question almost every day from people who tell me they were in a group of cars, there was vehicles or trucks beside them, and wondering how the officer measured their speed using the radar gun. If you have a speeding or reckless driving case, contact me today to see what defense options you have.

Video Transcription

Can the officer pick your speed out of a group of a group of cars using radar? Hi, I’m Andrew Flusche. I’m your Virginia traffic attorney. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. I get this question almost every day from people who tell me they were in a group of cars, there was vehicles or trucks beside them, and wondering how the officer measured their speed using the radar gun.

As you know, the radar is a wave device. It’s using kind of a broad array of radio waves across the roadway to measure your speed. How is it going to able to pick up the specific speed of your vehicle when there’s other things in the beam? The answer lies in the technology with the radar. There’s a couple different things that are going on here.

One is that the radar units these days typically have what’s called the fastest feature. They do have a button where the officer can basically tell the radar to give it the speed of the fastest object in the radar beam. That button let’s the officer say, “Okay, I can visually see that this particular car is moving faster. Now, with my radar, it will tell me what speed that object was moving.” Even though the radar may be picking up other things, if the officer says that your vehicle was visually overtaking everybody else in the area, then the judge will believe that he got your speed.

The other thing that can happen a lot of times that people … That really is disregarding the technology completely, is that a lot of times, the officer gets your speed before you ever see him. By the time you see an officer, and you look at your speedometer, and you look at traffic around you, the officer, a lot of times, has already measured your speed, whether you’re using radar, or lidar, or whatever. A lot of times, when you look around and you see other vehicles, it’s far too late. At that point, there may be vehicles around, but a little ways down the road, when the officer actually clocked you with a radar, you may have been the only vehicle in the radar beam.

That’s how … A couple of different ways that the officer could get you. There’s certainly other arguments the officer could use about how he was able to get your speed. Those are things we can definitely talk about when you contact me about your case.