Traffic: Somebody Up There Watching

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Not satisfied to snag speeders with only prowl cars and radar traps, the Florida highway patrol has a three-plane air force. At a couple of dozen locations, Florida highways are festooned with white stripes a quarter-mile apart. Orbiting at altitudes of 800 ft. to 1,500 ft., a trooper in a Piper Cub can clock cars whizzing by below. If his stop watch says a car has raced over the quarter-mile stretch too fast (less than 12.8 sec. in a 70-m.p.h. zone), the flying cop radios a cruiser on the ground to make the arrest. All of which goes a long way toward explaining why the highway patrol last year caught a record 3,500 speeders.

It is a record that is not likely to be broken soon. Just before the Labor Day traffic jam, Pinellas County Prosecutor Alan Williams fired a hail of legal flak at Florida's aerial constables by refusing to prosecute one John C. Winslow Jr., charged with speeding over a bridge-causeway between Tampa and St. Petersburg. The prosecutor declared that he had no other choice because a state statute limits arrests without warrant to offenses committed in the arresting officer's presence. "I'm not criticizing the use of an airplane," explained Williams, "but a police officer [on the ground] who hasn't observed a man committing a misdemeanor can't arrest him for it."

To the highway patrol's dismay, Florida's Attorney General Earl Faircloth last week went far beyond Williams' analysis in a ruling that suspended the use of radar and electronic timers as well as airplanes. Under current Florida law, said Faircloth, the information provided by all these gadgets is hearsay evidence and is therefore inadmissible. To restore electronic enforcement, Faircloth urged the state legislature to legalize such information by classifying it as prima-facie evidence. If the legislature agrees, Florida courts will be able to accept the evidence as conclusive whenever the defendant fails to rebut it.

The prima-facie technique has been adopted by legislatures or courts in many of the 45 states where police now use radar. Joining four other states,

Connecticut's top court recently went even further by ruling that all judges in that state can take "judicial notice" of the principle of radar, meaning that they can assume that the gadget works as claimed when properly set up and operated. A motorist caught speeding in Connecticut by radar has little chance of acquittal. The odds are that motorists in Florida and elsewhere may eventually have no better legal luck with aerial surveillance.