Sharing a shift with Maricopa Police Department

Maricopa Police Department is no foreign place to me. I show up daily to check the latest police reports.

This morning was different — I was not there to look at a binder, but to board a police cruiser (thankfully, not in the suspect transport enclosure) and catch some speeders with Sgt. Hal Koozer of the traffic unit.

Koozer beckoned me to the passenger seat of his unmarked Chevrolet Impala.

He laid down the ground rules — don’t get out of the car and don’t take photos of his computer screen. They were reasonable requests.

It was only a few minutes after we left the police station when we busted our first speeder with the car’s built-in radar detector. The dashboard-mounted device measures the speed of cars going the opposite way, best used on lone cars and less effective against a herd.

The man we pulled over was driving past Saddleback Elementary School on Porter Road at about 45 miles per hour, 10 over the limit.

Koozer let me decide whether to give the man a ticket or a warning. I chose leniency. Lucky for me, that was Koozer’s first choice, too.

“Even if I give a ticket, if they don’t say thank you, I didn’t do my job right.” Koozer said.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to be crummy to people just because they made a mistake,” he added. “You can’t show me one person whose driven who hasn’t made a mistake.”

Next came a speeding, swerving snowbird on the John Wayne Parkway overpass, and a man in a hurry to get home because he left his RV running. We left them both with warnings.

The covert car was working as intended, as no one seemed to realize we weren’t just normal drivers.

Koozer and I then stationed ourselves off Honeycutt Road near Rancho Mirage, where the sergeant pulled out his LiDAR gun and let me give it a shot.

I held the detector up to my eye, locked the crosshairs on an oncoming car and pulled the trigger. It beeped and told me how fast the guy was going.

Koozer reclaimed his detector and aimed it at an oncoming Buick, which clocked in at 57 in a 45. When dispatchers ran the plate, it came back to a Ford Fusion. The driver pleaded that the discrepancy was a dealership error, and we let her off with a warning.

The last traffic stop of the day was a BMW zooming at 60 miles per hour in a 45 zone. The driver told Koozer she was simply “jamming out” to music. She got a ticket but thanked Koozer on the way out. Mission accomplished.

“I got my ‘thank you,’ and ‘Nice to meet you, too’,” he told me.

Before Koozer dropped me back off at HQ, he introduced me to the traffic unit’s pair of motorcycle cops: Pedro Torres and Sebastian Sanchez.

Torres and I met once before at a crash I photographed, but it was nice rendezvous under more casual circumstances. Koozer said the two men are “the heart of the traffic unit.”

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