DETECTORS ARE FACING CHALLENGE

CAPE GIRARDEAU -- Both Cape Girardeau Police and a local traffic safety program are throwing their support behind a proposal to ban radar detectors in Missouri.

The coordinator of the Cape Girardeau County Community Traffic Safety program, Sharee Galnore, said the program feels speed is a problem on the state's highways. Thus, she said, the program believes it is important to let people know they must comply with speed limits.

"And the use of radar detectors works against that," said Galnore.

Rep. Sam Leake, D-Laddonia, is sponsoring a bill to outlaw the detectors. Leake has argued that accidents would drop without the detectors, which alert motorists to the use of radar by police to monitor vehicle speeds.

"We would have people following the speed limit without these," Leake told the House Civil and Criminal Law Committee earlier this week. Committee members did not vote on his bill.

Sgt. Al Moore of the Cape Girardeau Police Department said he would like to see the detectors outlawed. Most motorists have them only to exceed the speed limit, he said.

"(For) a person who's going to drive in the speed limit or close to it, there's no need for them to put out that additional expense and buy one," Moore said.

He estimated that possibly 25 percent of the motorists stopped in Cape Girardeau for speeding have a radar detector.

Capt. Robert Hagan of the Missouri State Highway Patrol testified to the house committee that 30 percent of all speeders caught by police use radar detectors. Passage of the bill, Hagan said, would be "a big step in reducing accidents, injuries and deaths on Missouri highways."

Many Cape Girardeau police officers use radar units intermittently right now instead of allowing them to continuously transmit, said Moore. When a vehicle comes into an officer's line of vision, he said, the officer clicks the unit on and picks the vehicle up.

The approach keeps the radar from being picked up all the time by detectors. As a result, Moore said, a lot of motorists with detectors get very upset when they get pulled over for speeding.

The manager of a business that sells radar detectors, Stereo One, at 250 Silver Springs Road, said he feels the detectors shouldn't be banned. But the manager, Steve Reed, said he doesn't feel that way because the store sells the detectors.

"On something like that I think it's such a waste of time to go to extremes over something that doesn't make much difference," he said.

Reed said he didn't see why people were making such a big deal over the detectors.

"Basically, it's kind of a game anyway: `We're going to catch you,' and, `No, you can't catch me.' That's the whole point behind it."

Moore said authorities in Kentucky are using new high-frequency radar units that can't be picked up by the radar detectors now on the market. A spokesperson for a radar manufacturer has claimed it will be two years before there will be any detectors on the market that would be able to detect the high-frequency units, he said.

Due to cost considerations, and until the radar units become more advanced and standardized, he said, the Cape Girardeau Police Department will wait before buying any of the units.

Moore said he imagined the detectors are more expensive than the radar units now in use. Most of those units, he said, run about anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000.

Some information for this story was provided by Associated Press.