Cobourg Police Help Train Neighbouring Port Hope Service With Laser Radar

Pete Fisher
3 years ago
• Categories: Local, Police Blotter

Cobourg Police Service helped out with training members of the Port Hope Police Service with using a new speed enforcement tool last week.

Traffic Sgt. Mike Richardson from the Cobourg Police Service was training members of the Port Hope Police Service on the use of a LDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) speed monitoring device which can monitor the speed of a specific vehicle in a pack of vehicles.

“With the LDAR it’s a laser beam pointed directly at that motor vehicle. Of those six cars travelling we can point the laser beam at each motor vehicle. It’s going to give us the speed of the motor vehicle and the metre reading it was read at.”

Richardson said radar and LDAR are both very accurate, but the LDAR comes in handy when you’re monitoring the speed of numerous vehicles.

With LDAR a laser beam shoots out from the hand held device directly at the vehicle you’re aiming the scope at. It then bounces back with all the calculations.

Richardson said usually everyone has an excuse when they get pulled over, but it’s not always necessarily about enforcement. Sometimes it’s about education.

“It’s been proven over and over again. When I was with Durham Region Police, when I was with Military Police and you can look it up on any internet page – speed does kill.”

“The roads are built for a reason with those speeds and it’s all engineered that way to handle that speed.”