In today’s episode we have a great conversation about the legal system and how it utilizes science with Officer Vince Sainati & City Attorney Maili Barber.
Speaker: Here we go.
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, POW
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
Regina: Welcome to Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, astrophysicist and educator. Today, we have a guest host. Jordan Baker could not make it today, so just like my previous guest hosts, this one is also related to me. My sister, prosecutor, Maili Barber. How’s it going?
Maili: Hi, I’m also an 8th grade science champion.
Regina: Are you really?
Maili: Yes, actually.
Regina: Oh, okay. I want to apologize to our listeners. She has a very similar voice to me, so this show is going to be great for you. [sarcasm]
I brought a prosecutor onto my show, my sister, and her friend and colleague, Officer Vince Sainati. How’s it going?
Vince: Good. Thanks for having me.
Regina: Yeah. We’re gonna talk today about the science of speeding tickets. I’m super excited.
Maili: First do we have to say that, everything we say is not a representation of where we work.
Vince: Nor is it the view of my employer or the agency that I work for.
Regina: Mmm, yes, and dramatization may not have happened.
Vince: Right.
Regina: So, you were actually told that you could be on my show, but you weren’t gonna be like, our city thinks all these things and —
Vince: Right.
Maili: Well, I think it’s a good suggestion either way.
[Laughing.]
And I’m not giving legal advice out, that sort of stuff too.
Regina: Right. She doesn’t give legal advice to me, listeners, it’s true.
Vince: I usually have to give her legal advice.
Regina: Right. Do you?
Vince: Yeah. No, you can’t do that. That’s against the law.
Maili: That’s not true. [Laughing.]
Vince: Are you kidding me? I could tell you stories.
Regina: Really? That is what we do in Spark Science. We tell stories of human curiosity. That’s our tagline. Don’t laugh at me, Maili. She’s laughing. Our listeners —
Vince: She lived with you for a long time.
Regina: Yeah, like my whole life.
Maili: It’s because we’re twins.
Regina: We are not twins. So, listeners, we will post pictures from this interview and you will see that we look nothing alike. We grew up in —
Vince: That is true. I can vouch for that. They look nothing alike.
Regina: We grew up in Lynden, Washington together, just with Jordan. Maili’s kind of sad she can’t see him today. In Lynden, people thought we were twins. Everywhere else in the world, we are not.
What we’re gonna talk about today is, I want to talk about radar guns, and what you said — lidar guns. We’re gonna talk about what the difference between those are. We’re also gonna talk about accident recreation. As a physicist, I know something about that.
Before we go into that, I want to talk to both of you about what is your science background and why did you become what you were. They might not be linked at all.
Vince: Yeah, I don’t have a science background.
Regina: Not at all? You don’t have any like — when you were a kid, you liked this?
Vince: I had like the science kit that used to have it as a kid that you would mix chemicals together and start small fires.
Regina: Yes.
Vince: Maybe, I’ve had to disclose in a background investigation that I used to make pipe bombs when I was a kid. You know, things like that.
[Laughing.]
Maili: Let’s clarify, initial background, like to become a police officer. Not like you got in trouble later on.
Vince: Right, no. You have these questions that you have to answer before you get polygraphed.
Regina: Before you get polygraphed? Wait. Every cop gets polygraphed?
Vince: Oh yeah. We go through a psychological evaluation.
Regina: Wow.
Maili: You didn’t know that?
Regina: No.
Vince: You have to do an MMPI, which is totally crazy, created by a crazy person I’m sure. So, they give you a list of questions. It’s like check the box. “Have you ever made explosives?” Check. “Have you ever committed arson?” Check. Then the polygrapher comes in and he’s like laughing and I said, “What’s up?” He goes, “I’ve never had anyone check all the boxes.”
Regina: Ooh. But you still passed?
Vince: Yeah.
Regina: A plus.
Vince: A plus. I passed.
Regina: So, you did like science as a kid, I mean, in a way, right?
Vince: In a way.
Regina: You liked things that exploded, like most people do. Did you always want to become a police officer?
Vince: No. Oh, no. I started when I was 16 I was a volunteer firefighter.
Regina: Oh, okay.
Vince: So, I worked with cops as a volunteer firefighter. I became a resident firefighter in Maple Valley. I was resident firefighter there and I hooked up with one of the volunteer lieutenants who was a King County deputy. I went for a ride along and I thought, I was hooked.
Regina: This is awesome.
Vince: This is awesome. This is like all the adrenaline and the chasing the bad guy thing.
Regina: Yeah.
Vince: Being a firefighter, it’s like, you had to wait for a call to come in. It was kinda boring. It was exciting if you had to go help somebody. I liked being active and being out in the public and I like talking to people, which is 99% of my job is talking to people.
Regina: Which is what you’re doing here.
Vince: How many listeners do we have?
Regina: We actually have a lot in the Netherlands all of a sudden.
Vince: That’s weird.
Regina: Hello to the Netherlands.
Vince: Hello, Netherlands.
Regina: I think it’s my last name DeGraaff and they’re like, okay, this lady’s cool. But yeah, we just got a blow up from the Netherlands recently.
Vince: Wow.
Maili: Impressive.
Regina: I know.
Vince: They’re gonna hear about the American law enforcement.
Regina: Right, they will. Let’s hope they don’t judge harshly. So, you wanted to become a cop. Is the whole rivalry between firefighters and cops, is that real? Because I see that on TV a lot played up. Is that real though?
Vince: It is real. We joke about it. I have a ton of friends on Facebook that are firefighters. We joke on the scene to relieve tension.
Regina: Because, sometimes it’s sad.
Vince: Yeah, it usually is if we’re there.
Regina: Right.
Vince: It’s a friendly banter back and forth.
Regina: So it’s a friendly rivalry.
Vince: I’ve been on both sides. It’s a friendly rivalry.
Regina: Do you have like baseball teams where you really go at it?
Vince: We used to. Not so much anymore. Because when you get hurt as a cop, you’re done.
Regina: Oh, that’s true.
Vince: We used to have the Bacon Bowl in Pierce County and it was a charity that the police and fire would play each other. Sometimes it was police agencies against police agencies.
Regina: Wow, like Internal Affairs.
Vince: I’ve never seen that show.
Regina: I haven’t either. I heard it’s terrible.
Vince: I don’t watch cop shows.
Regina: We will talk about pop culture towards the end, but I do want to bring that up, that like my sister over here, the one that has a similar voice, you like law shows, isn’t there right?
Maili: I do. Not Gina here. I will watch anything that has to do with legal drama.
Regina: Which makes me a liar, because I was telling people that lawyers don’t like law shows, because my husband who’s a lawyer doesn’t, but you do. You like Boston Legal and all that kind of stuff. But it’s not accurate, just like you said, you don’t watch cop shows because it’s not accurate, I’m guessing is the reason.
Vince: Well, no. It’s not the reason at all.
Maili: Well, I think there’s some accuracy.
Vince: There are some, but I just don’t like the way they portray police officers in some of the shows.
Regina: What about Brooklyn 99? I love that show.
Vince: Never seen it.
Regina: Oh my God. Maybe that’s the one show you might like.
Vince: Now, what I used to watch was the Reno 911. That was an awesome parody.
Regina: That’s so great.
Maili: That was a parody?
Regina: Stop! [Laughing.]
Vince: Well, for some.
Maili: I thought it was a reality show.
Vince: Depends on where you work.
Regina: Yeah. Maili, so you tell me. I actually know of your science background. We were science, like, champions. You were in the 8th grade. I was in the 6th grade. Then we went to the science center in Seattle.
Maili: That’s correct.
Regina: How were you a science champion? We had to like do an experiment to get in the program. So what was that?
Maili: I showed how water bugs float.
Regina: Yes, I remember. How do they float, Maili?
Maili: I don’t remember.
Vince: She’s not a scientist.
Regina: You used like butter. Do you not remember?
Maili: I did. I took a sewing needle, covered it in butter and placed it on top of water, which I learned from a book.
Regina: Yes, so you do remember.
Maili: That’s basically the extent of my science knowledge.
Vince: The bugs have butter on them and they float. That’s what you got from that?
Regina: Yeah, like oil. I did why did the sun rise in the east and set in the west. So, why did you become a lawyer, Maili?
Maili: Why I became a prosecutor or why I became an attorney?
Regina: I don’t know. Pick one.
Vince: Because she couldn’t get into astrophysicist school?
Regina: That’s very true.
Maili: The answer is because I’m not as smart as you, Gina.
Vince: That’s what she wanted to hear.
Regina: Thank you, that’s for listeners.
Maili: Last math class I took was junior year in high school.
Vince: Wow.
Regina: Let’s talk more about this lidar and radar class or whatever, certificate. I don’t listen to my sister. I’m only listening to Officer Vince Sainati.
Maili: That’s fine. He’s definitely more entertaining.
Vince: I dunno.
Maili: It’s a class that you have to take —
Vince: To become an operator, to be able to use them in the field, you have to go through training.
Regina: We’re gonna take pictures of all these radars while we’re playing with them. Later on, we’re gonna go into the road and scare the drivers of Bellingham and take some readings. How long is this class? What do you learn?
Maili: It’s like a whole day.
Vince: Yeah, mine was longer because it was back in the ’80s when I went through the lidar school.
Maili: The ’80s. That’s when I was born.
Vince: I know.
Regina: It was a long class in the ’80s. Why?
Vince: I want to say it was a 40-hour class when I went through, but my memory is not all there.
Regina: Officer Sainati is not very old.
Vince: Even when I started, they didn’t have lidar. I had to go to an 8-hour course just to get updated on lidar.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ Straight from twelfth grade into junior college
♪ Buddy buddy buddy I passed my exam
♪ Makin’ me a law enforcement person
♪ Got me a gun and a badge, I’m a man
♪ Radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪Forty three from where I was sitting
♪Thirty miles an hour is the law of our land
♪Please remove your license, find your registration
♪And what is the name of your insurance plan?
Regina: Let’s talk about what the heck lidar is. You have right in front of you what it stands for. LIDAR — what does that stand for?
Vince: Light detection and ranging.
Regina: Okay.
Vince: So, it’s using, basically, I dumb it down for attorneys so they understand. I have to dumb it down even more for the citizens that are sitting on a jury, because they think everything is CSI and they watch all these cop shows and they don’t realize it’s completely different.
So, basically, it’s a laser that’s measuring time and distance. It’s reflected off of the vehicle or the target and comes back to the radar unit and it tells me the distance and their speed.
[Ambient music playing in the background.]
But the most important thing behind that system is the person operating it and that’s the officer. I have to visually see that they’re speeding. That’s the first thing.
Regina: Okay.
Vince: I’m not relying just on the lidar.
Regina: This is a check, basically.
Vince: Right.
Regina: Okay.
Vince: When you’ve done this long enough — and you know as a driver how fast you’re going just by things going by you.
Regina: Unless everyone on the freeway is going the same speed, which sometimes happens.
Vince: It does happen. The operator of the unit visually sees the speeding vehicle and says, hey that guy’s going really fast. How fast? Faster than the speed limit, so then I use the lidar to dial in the exact speed. I’ve done it long enough that I’m within a mile and hour or two, usually 2 miles an hour plus or minus.
Regina: You’re guess, is what you’re saying?
Vince: Right. I’ll look at somebody and go, hey that guy looks like he’s doing about 55 in the 40. Oh, he’s going 56.
Maili: Well, to clarify, it’s not a guess. It’s an estimate.
Vince: Right. Guessing is not scientific.
Regina: It’s true. Thank you for that lesson for both of you.
[Laughing.]
Maili: You’re welcome.
Regina: Does the detection of the lidar — does it depend on like the kind of car and the kind of surface the car has? Like, if you have a car that’s just primer or something.
Vince: No.
Regina: Because reflection coefficients are gonna be different for different objects.
Vince: Well, there’s either reflection or a absorption or a refraction. So, the things that we target on the car are the flat surfaces, the reflective surface. So, my primary target on a car is the front license plate.
Regina: Ooh, okay, yeah.
Vince: Most people don’t have a front license plate.
Regina: Oh, that’s true.
Maili: That’s an infraction.
Vince: In the State of Washington, you’re required to have both front and rear.
Maili: It’s $136 ticket. Auto dealerships don’t put them in front and I think that kind of just — they get the car that way. That’s what I feel like a lot of people —
Vince: That’s one of the reasons. Another reason is that some of the vehicles aren’t designed that have that up front, so then they have to buy an add-on bracket, so that costs more money. Although, they’re driving a $50,000 vehicle, they don’t want to spend another $50 on a bracket.
Regina: These cars that don’t have the front are usually the nicer cars.
Vince: Yeah, sometimes.
Regina: Okay, just wondering.
Vince: There are some people that live in an area that might have photoradar or photo red light. They think that if I don’t have a front license plate, I’m not gonna get caught.
Regina: Mythbusters — one of our student intern editors here told me about Mythbusters. They were talking about this idea of a speeding camera. In the US, you only need a picture of one of the license plates. It’s the rear. In the UK, you need a picture of the front and the back, so it’s much easier to get out of speeding tickets apparently.
Vince: In Washington State, you cannot record the driver in the image.
Regina: Oh, okay.
Vince: Which is odd. In other states, you can. And it’s all about legislators and people not wanting to get caught. Imagine, you, you’re husband gets a speeding ticket and you want to know who the woman is in the front seat next to him.
Regina: Ah.
Vince: So they restrict it to back image only.
Maili: That can’t be the only reason.
Vince: Well, that’s my opinion.
Regina: Not the opinion of the city in Oregon.
Maili: We don’t currently deal with photo enforcement.
Vince: No, we don’t have that. We did in the past and it wasn’t received very well by the citizenry.
Maili: You can understand why you would want to have it. You can get an officer off the road and you can maintain an area to where, maybe a school zone, so people can watch their speed. But then, you kind of lose that human element.
I would argue that a majority of people speed. Either you get caught by the police officer or you don’t. When you have photo enforcement everywhere, there isn’t that human element. It’s gone. That’s kind of —
Regina: Do you think it reinforces the stereotype of big brother?
Vince: I don’t know.
Maili: I don’t know. I love 1984.
Regina: You do not.
Vince: Maybe a little bit. The major complaint that we received was that they didn’t have that human contact and people felt that they might be able to talk their way out of a ticket versus — there’s no way talking your way out of a picture. You have to go to court and talk to the judge and see if the judge will reduce it or dismiss it.
Maili: Or hire an attorney.
Regina: My sister did point out, she apparently did read 1984. I didn’t.
Maili: I did.
Regina: You have the human element too. You’re shooting the lidar at the license plate, then it comes back. What is the difference between how you use the lidar versus how you use the radar?
Vince: Well, the radar is more of a shotgun affect. It’s a broader beam so you’re broadcasting a Doppler beam that’s a wide path. So you’re picking up all the traffic. The particular radar that I have is a directional radar so I can lock out either vehicles coming at me or towards me or I can do both.
Regina: It does say directional. I like it.
Vince: Right. So, if I’m working an eastbound lane and I don’t want to catch the westbound traffic, I can just use the “towards me” versus going away. So I can be more discriminative of my target. So, basically, radar I use on two-lane road, generally not multiple lanes, because then I gotta say, oh yeah, it was that car and he was going faster than the other car and it’s just more explaining to do in court, where the lidar is vehicle specific.
This particular lidar has a magnification of 6 power. So, it’s kinda like — I tell people the radar is the shotgun and the lidar is the sniper rifle.
Regina: God. That goes over well, I’m sure. [Laughing.]
Vince: Yeah. I’ve explained that in court too to the judge, that I can target a specific vehicle in heavy traffic. So, on the radar, I would have to switch it over to faster target. Somebody’s going real fast behind a semi-truck that’s going slow, it’ll discriminate or lock out the slower moving vehicle and pick up the faster one. Where, the lidar, I don’t need to do that. I just pick the faster one.
People will say, well it wasn’t me. You got the other guy.
Maili: Remember, the lidar is a laser. He can also measure the distance at which where he’s standing to where the person he’s gathering their speed.
Regina: Right. So, you can measure the distance because we know the speed of light, so therefore, we know once it comes back to the measuring device, we know exactly how far it went.
Vince: Yes, and it’s instant because it’s at the speed of light.
Regina: Right, almost instant.
Vince: Pretty — for as far as humans are concerned.
Regina: Yes.
Maili: Both of these are handheld, the ones he’s talking about. His radar is handheld and his lidar is handheld. What we haven’t talked about is moving radar, which —
Vince: I have on my motorcycle — moving radar. With the lidar, it’s a smaller beam of light and if they don’t have the front license plate, I just switch to the headlight, because what’s behind a headlight? A mirror. It’s shining the light back out.
Regina: Yes. I thought you were gonna be like, the image of the person looking into — I’m so confused.
Vince: [Laughing.]
Regina: Yes, the mirror.
[Ambient music.]
Vince: So, behind the light is a mirror reflecting the light back, so you have the ability to see better. So I use that as my secondary target because that will reflect the light back to me faster. Or not — we’re not talking faster as far as we can perceive, but it locks faster if they don’t have that front plate.
Maili: So, can I talk about some of the arguments that you’re gonna hear in court?
Regina: Yeah, please. You’re a good co-host Maili.
Maili: Thank you. So, the officer must have got the person next to me, because I was driving just as fast as somebody or somebody was passing me at the same time.
Regina: So, these are the excuses you hear.
Maili: Correct. So, what do you say to that?
Vince: When it’s the lidar, it’s very simple. I’ve actually put in my notes that — I write in my notes what they tell me. It wasn’t me; it was the other guy. I explain, well no actually the other guy was going 50 and you were doing 56 when you were passing them. I’ll target the vehicle next that’s going slower, then I’ll target the vehicle going faster and you were passing that other vehicle or you were gaining on traffic.
I had a guy the other day say, well I was slowing down. I said, you’re right, you were slowing down, because I got you at 58 the first time in the 40 and I locked you the second time at 56. So, you slowed by 2 miles an hour in a second.
Maili: Well, what if you got confused? What if I was in this vehicle and you’re looking at two different vehicles, what if you pulled over the wrong vehicle?
Vince: Well, because this has the magnification so I know it was your vehicle because I put it on your license plate. I can actually read license plates with this at 200 feet.
Regina: So, he’s saying, by “this” he’s pointing at the lidar.
Vince: I’m pointing at the lidar.
Regina: Yeah. So, do you hear these arguments a lot, Maili?
Maili: Absolutely. One of the other big ones is, well when I looked down I was only going 5 over the speed limit, and he said I was going 20. There’s no way, because I when I looked down and I saw him behind me I was only going 5.
Vince: Well, by that time I’ve already got them.
Regina: Right. [Laughing.]
Vince: When I looked, I said, well yeah, you looked after I pulled out. I had you 150 feet from me. You didn’t even know I existed. People don’t realize that they were caught long before I pull out.
Regina: Right. They’re reacting to seeing you in the corner of their eye and then they’re slowing down and they’re like, see I was going slower.
Vince: Right.
Regina: Got it. It’s reaction time.
Vince: Yes, which is about 1.5 seconds for the average person that’s not looking at their phone.
Regina: It’s 1.5 seconds? I just had reaction time on my midterm and it was 0.5 seconds. I should’ve made it longer.
Vince: Well, I should say that when we do collision investigations, we use a reaction time of 1.5 seconds because it gives the benefit of the doubt to the person. It all depends. We’re always trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the person. When we talk about it later, I’ll explain that we use different ranges of coefficient of friction of the roadway to show them a different range of speeds that it could be.
Regina: Right. So, we’re gonna take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna be outside measuring people’s speeds and Maili, sorry, prosecutor Barber and Officer Sainati and I are gonna go measure some speeds. Then when we come back to the studio, we’re gonna talk about coefficients of friction and basically accident recreation.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ Radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ I’m making money and I’m havin’ fun
♪ With my radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ With my brand new radar gun
♪ You know our sheriff, William Buchberger
♪ Says our mayor’s got a master plan
♪ A new pulse gun means a cost o’ livin’
♪ And one of them stop lights down on grand
♪ Radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ I’m making money and I’m havin’ fun
♪ With my radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ With my brand new radar gun
Regina: Alright, so we are outside and we are playing with the lidar first. I’m here with Officer Sainati and my sister, Maili Barber.
Vince: Alright, so what you’ll do is take that, okay, you hold it down. There you go. See it?
[Beeping sounds.]
I have it set on pulse, so it’s sending a pulse lidar signal.
Maili: Okay, I got it.
Vince: So, every second, it’s sending a signal beam out.
Regina: It has signage that’s saying like negative 5 miles per hour and positive 5 miles per hour.
Vince: Because the target is either going towards you or away from you.
Regina: What’s great for my physics students, see, coordinate systems matter.
Vince: Yes.
Regina: I’m gonna do a taxi now.
Vince: You’re not gonna get him because he’s going — get that car right through the intersection. He’s going a little fast.
Maili: She’s too excited.
Vince: You’re pressing the wrong button.
Regina: Ah, wrong button.
Vince: That’s alright. There’ll be other cars.
Regina: Yeah, so it’s a boxy device. I’m looking through a kind of —
Vince: It’s a monocular.
Regina: Monocular, yes. I’m gonna do this one right here.
Vince: They’re going pretty slow. You gotta be going at least 5 miles an hour.
Regina: Okay. Got it. Come on truck, I’m waiting on you. No, I think they’re all super scared of me now.
Maili: Everyone is slowing down drastically.
Vince: There’s a crazy person pointing something at me. People are calling 911 right now.
Regina: I’m with a cop though, so how dare they. [Beeping sound.] Oh, he’s going 15. [Beeping sound.] 14, 15. Yes, this is awesome!
Vince: Now, as your angle changes, it’s gonna change their speed a little bit. Usually what I would say is, in their benefit, because it’s gonna show a lower speed, because of the cosine angle.
Maili: I was going to say, this is a very valuable lesson, because there’s a lot of attorneys that argue against tickets like this and have never seen a lidar or radar before. In court, Officer Sainati has actually shown defense attorneys for the first time what a lidar device looks like. This is something that the general public doesn’t usually get to look at and see.
Regina: Yeah, I agree. This is very informative for me.
Maili: I would encourage people to go to their local citizen’s academies in their police departments and you get to see what it’s like, I guess, to be a police officer from a citizen’s point of view, and you get to see lidars and radars among other things.
Vince: So, this is a stationary handheld radar device. It has, if you want to take a look there, I’m gonna hit the test, and it’s gonna do an internal diagnostic test to show that it’s working properly. It’s gonna go through the speeds.
[Beeping sounds.] You hear the tones there?
Regina: Yes.
Vince: That tone, because you’re kind of a science person —
Regina: Yeah, kind of. [Sarcasm.]
Vince: Yeah, a little bit, maybe. [Sarcasm.] — is actually from the movie Top Gun.
Regina: Oh my gosh!
Vince: Yes, I thought you would like that. The radar lock goose [sp?]. I’m too close for guns — or too close for radar, I’m going to guns. Yeah, that’s what that sound comes from.
Alright, so I’m gonna do the tuning fork to show you how we check tuning forks. [High pitch tone followed by beeping.] Then you get the —
[static sound]
Then you get a reading of 77 miles per hour.
Regina: That is awesome!
Vince: — which corresponds with the tuning fork. The other tuning fork is set at, like I said, at 33, so then we’ll set it again.
[High pitched tuning fork.]
Regina: So, this is him hitting the tuning fork and then the radar recording 33.
Vince: So, I have to do these checks before and after work to verify that it’s working properly —
Regina: Right, it’s still good.
Vince: Then it’s documented. These are checked yearly, which is by state statute. Without it, I’m useless. Without me, it is useless.
Regina: Okay.
Vince: That comes from a movie, if you know what movie.
Regina: No, I don’t know that movie. Is it like Jerry Maguire or something?
[Laughing.]
Vince: No. Full Metal Jacket.
Regina: Oh, Full Metal Jacket. See, that movie has been told to me that I need to watch it many times.
[Low tone.]
Vince: That’s 17 miles an hour. See the T? That means he was going towards me.
Regina: Okay.
Vince: This car going away from me — [tone increasing in pitch.] See how it says A? He’s speeding up.
Regina: So, that weird sad sound is the radar gun.
Vince: Right. As the speed increases, it’s a higher pitch, so that is another check that I have to verify. Yeah, it’s a vehicle. The visual I see of that vehicle speeding is consistent to the tone that I’m hearing and of the speed being displayed on the radar.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
[♪ Instrumental section ♪]
Regina: We’re back in studio now. We’ve just come back from basically scaring Bellingham drivers. They saw us out there with the lidar and the radar and they’ve slowed down a lot, I think.
Maili: Yeah, we made it a safer place. You’re welcome downtown Bellingham.
Regina: There we go.
Vince: Yeah, for that moment in time, they slowed down.
Regina: They were very cautious. These prosecutors that are in court and they’ve never seen this lidar device, which we’re all kind of commenting that it looks like binoculars. They’ve just never seen it before. I don’t know if the citizens really do not believe you can do it, because they don’t have a lot of science background, or they just really hope that you can’t do it. I don’t know what it is.
Vince: I don’t know. You know, everybody’s different. Some people are very understanding. It’s like, yeah, I was doing it, sorry. Take mercy on me. Others are like, screw you, I’m gonna fight this to the nth because you’re wrong, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me.
I tell people, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. Go to court. Then they have to meet your sister and that’s not so good.
Regina: Right. Exactly. If I’m a citizen and I’m speeding and then I get pulled over, what is the best odds for me to get a warning instead of a ticket?
Maili: The one that really doesn’t work is “I really have to go to the bathroom. I’m so sorry I’m driving fast. I just really have to go.” That one never works.
Regina: Okay, got it.
Vince: Yeah.
Regina: Yeah, let’s go through the ones that never work. It’s helpful for our listeners.
Vince: Well, that one never works because I already know how many bathrooms they’ve passed. I’ve put it in my notes.
Maili: He will write it in his notes.
Regina: [Gasp.]
Maili: You’ve passed seven perfectly clean bathrooms.
Vince: Yeah. I’ve had a few try to do the pee pee dance in their car, you know, cross their legs. “I gotta go really bad.” Well, you passed five gas stations and three Starbucks and you couldn’t use any of those?
I had one woman saying she was speeding because she just started menstruating.
Regina: Because you’re a male and she thinks you would freak out.
Vince: Yeah, it’s like, like I care?
Regina: You’re like, “I have daughters. Next.”
Vince: Yeah. “Really, that’s all you got?”
[Ambient music.]
Maili: Your profession. I’m an attorney or I’m a firefighter. Let’s have some professional courtesy. That doesn’t work.
Vince: It just depends. If it’s something I was gonna warn somebody on anyway, they’re gonna get a warning, regardless. If they’re going so fast that — I’ve already made the decision that they’re getting a ticket when I stop them.
Regina: Okay. That’s a good thing to tell people. Like, it’s pretty much decided.
Vince: It’s decided by me. You’re going 15 over the posted speed limit. I’ve already made the decision, you’re gonna get a ticket. It might not be for 15 over. A lot of times I write it for less than that. I give them a break. I note it in my notes and I put it on their ticket. I put —
Regina: “I gave you a break.”
Vince: Well no. It says “actual speed.” So, I explain to them. I say, “listen, I wrote you for 10 over instead of 20 over, so I cut it in half. I note it on here so the judge will see that, that you were actually doing 40 in a 20 and I only wrote you for 10 in a 20.”
Maili: Here’s the other thing. I remember being pulled over back in the day. I actually had my driver’s abstract with me and I have had no tickets on there. I remember saying to the officer, “I’m a very good driver.” I even brought out my abstract. They don’t see people’s history. So, they can’t see that you’ve had 20 tickets or zero tickets.
Regina: The police officers cannot see it.
Vince: We can request it.
Maili: I shouldn’t say they can’t see, but they typically don’t see.
Vince: Yeah. I typically don’t check somebody’s driving record, unless it’s really bad. Like, I stopped a guy doing 74 in a 40 and he was kind of sideways drifting in a curve. So, I walk up and I say, “I need a license, registration, proof of insurance. This is what I’m stopping you for.”
He’s like, “yeah I know, I was going pretty fast there. I was slowing down though.”
Okay, but you’re still going 74 in a 40. So, I want to check that guy’s license. He’s suspended and he’s got a — and the dispatcher will tell me — yeah, he’s got a 6 page ADR. My response is, yeah, no shock here because he’s got — doing 74 in a 40. You know when somebody’s a bad, aggressive driver versus soccer mom who’s late for getting her kids to school or whatever.
Regina: Right.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ Schedule 19 on a special election
♪ Got our money problems right in hand
♪ Droppin’ them limits like a hot potato
♪ Fifty down to thirty oh, man, oh, man!
♪ Radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ I’m making money and I’m havin’ fun
♪ With my radar gun
♪ Radar gun
♪ With my brand new radar gun
♪ Brand new shiny Simmons radar gun
Maili: I wanted to add that, when it finally comes to court and I do talk to a defense attorney about a ticket, I try to give people breaks who are honest. In the officer notes, if it says, “I’m sorry, I was driving fast.” Even though that’s a slam dunk for me, hoping that the ticket’s all good in that sense, I’m gonna give that person a break over the person who was, you know, maybe not as cooperative or someone who just flat out says, “no that’s not true.” When we know the science behind it, it is true.
Regina: Right, because we’re using these devices.
Maili: Being honest is going to help you, hopefully, at least in our jurisdiction it will.
Regina: Wow.
Vince: You have the two extremes. You get some people that cry or —
Maili: Does the crying work?
Vince: No.
[Laughing.]
Vince: Again, I’m stopping them for a reason. It’s usually 15 over. Most cops don’t stop somebody unless they’re doing — my saying has always been “9 your fine, 10 your mine.”
Regina: That’s the saying I’ve heard many, many times.
Vince: When you’re going 10 over the speed limit, that’s a little excessive. A lot of people, that’s their major complaint. When they call people, or police, and they complain, it’s not about “my house is being broken into all the time” or “there’s murders in the street.” It’s, in our community, it’s “somebody’s speeding by my house, children are gonna get hurt, and you’re not doing anything about it.”
Maili: I think that’s a good segue to accidents, because speed kills.
Regina: Yeah.
Maili: Like, flat out, speed kills.
Regina: Yeah.
Vince: Speed and inattention.
Maili: Yes. We deal with DUIs and what-not, but speed is scary.
Regina: Right. Like, our listeners know I teach physics and in my first year physics course, we talk about friction with the road. We talk about — there are these tire marks on the road. You can actually measure the distance. You can say that, if I know the distance and I know the car eventually stopped, then I can go backwards and use physics and use kinematic equations and find out what that initial velocity was.
If you actually calculated that initial velocity and it’s well over the speed limit, then this person is gonna get, I don’t know, arrested or a ticket or something.
Vince: Well, it depends. It really depends on that speed and what it did. Did they run over a pedestrian that they could’ve avoided had they been doing the speed limit?
Regina: Right.
Vince: So, we have to do time-distances, figure out the coefficient of friction of the roadway at the time, which we give a generous reading on. So, we’ll go two or three points above or below just to show a range. You’re only changing that speed from 35.4 miles an hour to maybe 35.7 miles an hour. Is that 0.7 really gonna make a difference? But we’re showing that we’re trying to be fair and giving that person the benefit of the doubt. You always give those ranges.
Regina: For our listeners, coefficient of friction, we’re just saying that like, for instance, maybe tires on a road —
[Ambient music.]
— the friction that those tires experience versus the tires on a wet road is gonna be different. So that coefficient of friction is telling these officers, telling scientists that it would be different resistance in those two different situations.
Vince: Right, which will cause a shorter or longer time to slow down or stop. Officers are really only gonna calculate that if there’s any question of speed involved. So let’s say somebody gets rear ended and there’s a lot of damage to the car and there’s a lot of skid mark. And the person’s saying, “It’s 25, I was only going 25.” You look at the marks, going, “that’s not possible.” Those marks, to me, say you’re doing at least 40.
Regina: You can do the physics and actually say that.
Vince: Then we can do the physics and do that and say, “No actually, you’re going 39.9 miles an hour. That’s giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Regina: I love it. I love that because my students actually did that problem in class and part of the problem is — it was a problem that my friend, another professor had written. It said like, make sure your calculations are correct. You might have to testify in court.
Who actually writes — because you’d shown me some of the physics that cops actually do — or police officers do — where does that come from? Where’s the source of all of those case studies and all those problems and those formulas? Where does the police department get those from?
Vince: Reconstructionists that were actual scientists that dumbed it down to cops so that we can punch in a formula. I’m what’s called a technical reconstructionist. There are four tiers of collision investigation. You have your basic, you have your advanced collision investigator, you have your technical collision investigator, which that’s what I have — and then you have a reconstructionist.
The difference between the tech that I am and a reconstructionist, the reconstructionist can tell you how they came to that formula. They go into the science of it and break it down.
I can go and say, well I was trained that this formula is used in this instance and this is why I used it.
Regina: So, does each department have a reconstructionist or is it kind of a state thing? Could I get a job as a reconstructionist?
Vince: You could, if you went to the training.
Regina: Oh my God, I want to now.
Vince: Then you could work on the private side. You could work — what we call the dark side. They go against the police officer and say, well — they try to get their client off by using different formulas or different things. I’ve been in a couple civil cases where that’s occurred.
Regina: I bet I’d get paid more though.
Vince: You would because you have this thing called PhD behind your name and you’re a rocket scientist or an astrophysicist.
Regina: One of those. Not a rocket scientist.
Vince: Probably both.
Regina: Well, I’ve never made a rocket.
Maili: Yet. [Joke/joking.]
Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.]
Vince: We dumb this down for the street cop. We only use these when there’s a real severe collision, death, serious injuries where somebody’s life has been altered permanently and there’s gonna be civil litigation. Whether that civil litigation may be against the agency you work for because of roadway design, whether it’s going to be used because the vehicle they were using was defective — we look into a lot of different things in a collision that’s real serious.
Normal fender bender — it’s not gonna get investigated like this. We do a simple report. Unit 1 hit unit 2 because they weren’t paying attention. They ran into somebody. Usually PEMCO [sp?] pain. That’s what we call somebody that’s like, “oh my neck, I’m paralyzed” but they don’t have the damage to their vehicle.
So, then we look at kinematics. We look into that. I can actually say that I got a complaint because I told this woman that — she was what we call — it’s a scientific term — it’s called LLPOF.
Regina: I don’t know what that is.
Vince: You don’t? You’re a scientist!
Regina: LLPOF.
Vince: LLPOF.
Maili: I’m a little bit afraid of what that stands for.
Vince: Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Regina: Oh, okay good.
Maili: Yes, I’m familiar with the pants on fire theory.
Regina: Defense and prosecution.
Vince: Yeah, we say “this is a LLPOF” — liar, liar pants on fire.
Regina: And she got super mad?
Vince: Yes.
Regina: When you’re in court, have you —
[Laughing.]
Maili: Yes, I’ve seen people’s pants on fire quite a bit in court.
Regina: Right. Smoke alarms go off. So, when you are in court, have you ever had these people actually try to use science, use physics, for their defense and then have somebody like Officer Sainati go against their claim?
Maili: Well, you know, in my level, I don’t really see quite a bit, but I do have Officer Sainati in court quite a bit and defense attorneys will know when they come to my jurisdiction, he’s usually in there. So, you can’t really fight his tickets. His tickets are really good. All of our tickets are pretty good — very good I should say, actually. Our traffic unit is amazing.
But I do have certain collisions where I have actually — I have these little foam cars and I have a foam — I know this sounds ridiculous — I’ve got a foam van, different cars, I think I even have a foam taxi.
Regina: Do you have foam people?
Maili: I don’t have foam people.
Vince: We could use a flat Stanley [sp?] on a few.
Regina: That’s right. [Laughing.]
Maili: Officer Sainati does use them and I do use them in testimony to show, when you have multiple vehicles — really, who I’m showing the evidence to is the judge at a contested hearing. So this is a civil infraction. It really does do a good job at showing the judge what happened visually.
Then, witnesses will come in and use it too. Sometimes even the defendant — because I can call them to testify against themselves, because they don’t have a Fifth Amendment right in civil hearings.
Regina: Oh, really?
Maili: That’s one of the reasons why I have them foam by the way, so that they can’t be thrown as projectile objects.
Regina: Oh my gosh!
Maili: He’s used them in a couple of collisions that I’ve dealt with. One of them that comes to mind was there was tracks or prints in a snow collision.
Vince: It was actually frozen fog. We had freezing fog.
Regina: What is freezing fog?
Vince: Well it’s foggy out and it’s below 32 degrees. So, as the fog — as it crystalizes, it touches the ground and forms kind of a white — you know how when you wake up in the morning, you look outside, it’s been cold out, like “oh, it looked like it snowed.”
Regina: Right, like a frost.
Vince: Right. It’s a frost, but it’s caused by fog. So, there’s limited sight distance. She — the woman came around a curve and it was a curved road and she went up on the sidewalk.
Maili: She T-boned another vehicle.
Vince: Yeah.
Regina: Ooh.
Vince: So, she’d lost control because of the icy road conditions. There were prints on the road that showed the direct travel of the vehicle and how the tire marks swapped over as she was rotating. The tire marks really just tell us what the vehicle did.
Regina: Right. Officer Sainati is moving his hand because he’s imagining that foam vehicle that he’s playing with it —
Vince: I’m rotating the car in a counterclockwise circle. I’m Italian, I talk with my hands. I’m very bad at radio.
Regina: No, it’s okay.
Maili: He uses the little foam cars, but it helps — but also we have photos. All of our officers do a really good job at taking photos and that definitely helps down the road. That was a really good case.
Regina: Did you win?
Maili: Of course.
[Laughing.]
Vince: Yes. I’m looking at this attorney who’s asking me questions. I’m thinking, he is not a criminal attorney. He’s gotta be like a civil guy that does divorces, because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Regina: Because Maili just crushed him.
Vince: I just have enough time on that I can say, I’m looking at Maili and she’s got this evil look in her eye like, “I’m going to devour you.”
Maili: I was born with that look.
Regina: That’s right. You were. I’m scared of it still.
Maili: The average citizen, I do every once in a while get people who argue a really technical argument. But, I want to say like 9 times out of 10, while they’re talking, I’m googling exactly what they’re saying. I can see — a lot of times people get arguments from, like, an Australian website was one of them. It’s just random stuff they found on the internet, which I just repeat what I see on the website. It usually doesn’t fly very well.
Vince: I would recommend to your listeners, if you want to fight a ticket, by all means go ahead, that’s your right. But don’t do it yourself, because you’re not going to be able to look on the internet, go into court and even sound like you know what you’re talking about. It’s sad, because I see people do this, thinking, oh my goodness, what are you thinking? Hire an attorney.
Regina: You feel bad for them.
Vince: Yeah, because you’re randomly talking about things that make no sense at all because you read it on the internet. It has no bearing in a lot of cases. The judge is like, umm, that has no bearing here. What are you talking about? They try to confuse some facts. Don’t represent yourself. Hire somebody that does it for a living.
Maili: That’s the answer when people ask me, like, how do you beat a ticket? The answer is, you hire an attorney. Well, that’s my answer. Vince has another answer.
Regina: Let’s take a break. Before we take a break, I want you, Maili, to say the one line that you learned in law school about representing yourself. What was that line?
Maili: Everybody knows this line. I’m gonna mess it up now. It’s like the second year at law school. What is it? A person who represents himself has a fool for a client.
Regina: That’s right. We’re going to take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about pop culture and how Boston Legal and other cop shows are talking about speeding tickets, are talking about defending these speeding tickets, and maybe it’s super inaccurate.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ Me and my partner go patrol car cruisin’
♪ On the parking lots at the shopping malls
♪ Scanning those dashes, those mirrors and visors
♪ The little detectors that ruin it all
♪ Johnny caught one on an ’86 t-bird
♪ Pull up slow just as close as I can
♪ Milliwatt-seconds on maximum output
♪ We’ll dust that puppy with one small blast of my
♪ Radar gun
Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking about the science of speeding tickets. We just talked about lidar guns, radar guns, accident reconstruction. But now, I want to talk to my co-host, who is also my sister, Maili Barber, and Officer Vince Sainati. We’re gonna talk about pop culture.
We’re gonna talk about, let’s say, I’m just gonna throw something out there: Super Troopers.
Vince: Awesome movie.
Regina: If we’re gonna talk about speeding and we’re gonna talk about science and TV, let’s talk about Super Troopers. So, how accurate is Super Troopers?
Vince: Not at all.
Maili: No, syrup is tasty.
Regina: This is the very beginning of the show, this idea of seeing your profession on TV. That’s something we talk about on this show. You said that you do like law shows.
Maili: I do, I love it.
Regina: Okay. But, where are the inaccuracies of law shows? Also, for Officer Sainati, where are the inaccuracies of any sort of cop show — I know you don’t watch them, but maybe you saw some.
Maili: Starting with me, and I talk about this with colleagues all the time, we don’t typically do closing arguments in a minute and a half. Usually you can’t get people on the stand to start yelling that they are guilty and confessing.
Regina: Right, the crying and confessing doesn’t —
Maili: I have had someone jump up and start pointing at me and screaming at me and calling me devious because I was asking questions, of course. But that rarely happens. I’ve been practicing for almost 10 years and that doesn’t happen. It’s entertaining.
Regina: My sister is super old.
Maili: [Laughing.] It’s entertaining, but it doesn’t happen. Vince will probably have more to say about — there’s a lot more cop shows than, I feel like, actual court room dramas because you’re not in the courtroom that much.
Regina: One inaccuracy with courtroom dramas that I remember, when you were in law school and my husband just finished law school, so he had his first job, somebody was talking about Boston Legal and they wanted to go watch you too, because you were interning in the trial.
They really believed that an accident would happen and then the next day people would be in court and then the next day somebody would be convicted, like it’s that quick. It just doesn’t — that doesn’t happen, right?
Maili: No, it doesn’t. I mean, I think juries are as crazy as they are on TV, definitely.
Regina: [Laughing.] Opinion of my sister, not of —
Maili: No, and that’s sometimes a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. You get people of all different backgrounds, but sometimes you go into a trial knowing, I think, right, in voir dire, our jury selection, that you’re tanked.
I had, back in the day when marijuana was illegal, I had a marijuana trial, and one of the questions I asked in jury selection was “Who here thinks that marijuana should be legal?” and every single person raised their hand. Every single person.
Regina: You’re like, how am I going to pick my jury?
Maili: How am I going to prosecute a crime that all of these people believe should not be a crime? That’s something that you battle with as an attorney or prosecutor.
Vince: I’ll be the nerd and actually come out and say, as a kid, I watched CHiPs, which is why I wanted to be a motorcycle cop when I grew up.
Regina: Well, yeah, those guys were awesome.
Maili: That’s hilarious.
Vince: But the reality is, I live in Washington State. It rains here a lot. It’s miserable out there on a motorcycle when it’s raining.
[Laughing.]
Regina: It’s not like Hawaii or California.
Vince: I’m sure every motorcycle cop out there is going, “Yeah, I hate going and working in the rain, but that’s what we do.”
Regina: I also thought about the CSI and thought that would happen. I was nine, Maili was 11. Our house was actually robbed in San Diego — we lived in–
Vince: That’s a burglary.
Regina: Burglary, sorry.
Vince: Robbery is when someone comes in with a gun and points it at you.
Regina: Oh, sorry. Burglary. We were burgled.
Vince: I hate it when that happens.
Regina: This was in San Diego. We were living in a not so great place. We came home and all of our stuff was thrown around. My Lynden Lions bag that I just got and my new Walkman that I just got for my birthday stolen. All my dad’s — he had these coins — were stolen.
Maili: Collectibles.
Regina: Collectibles. But, the people that came in and burgled, they went into the refrigerator and they took a giant bite out of the block of cheese and drank our Sprite. That enraged me. As a nine-year-old, I told the cops, “Why can’t you get dental records off of that bite of the cheese.”
Maili: It was a perfectly — the bite was perfect. I totally remember this.
Regina: I was like, “why can’t you get dental records?” As a nine-year-old, from TV — right? I was so offended that the cops did not listen to me. I was like, “Are you gonna catch this guy? He’s walking around with a Lynden Lions bag. He took my bag.
Vince: People think that we have all this evidence on everybody in the world. We don’t.
Regina: I was nine, okay?
Vince: I know. But even adults think, well they left this behind.
[Ambient music.]
Well, okay. How do I — I’ll take pictures and we’ll try to lift fingerprints, but —
Regina: They got fingerprints from the Sprite bottle.
Maili: They did.
Vince: But they have to be on file somewhere. That means they had to have been arrested for another crime and fingerprinted before for us to find them, which — that could take years.
Maili: And statute of limitations on certain crimes. There are certain movies or TV shows that are realistic, or elements that are realistic. I was thinking of one, actually, for you, not for our profession. I remember when we watched Monsters University. Do you remember that cartoon?
Regina: Yeah. One of the best movies on higher education that has been made.
Maili: So, in this cartoon, at the university, these two students end up — the main students — end up cheating.
Regina: Spoiler alert.
[Laughing.]
Maili: Oh yeah, spoiler. Sorry, for those of you who haven’t seen it. They end up cheating and they get kicked out of the university. They are actually prominent in their field. People could be laughing if they’ve seen this movie because I’m talking about it so professionally, but they are prominent in their field, but they had to work from the ground up because they got kicked out of university for cheating.
Regina: They don’t have degrees. They went from the mailroom of Monsters Inc. all the way to the top. Because, if you cheat, you can no longer be a student. You shouldn’t get so many tries — if you flat out cheat, you’re gone.
Maili: I remember talking to you about that and you were like, “this is so realistic.” Monsters.
Regina: Monsters, Inc. Yeah, Monsters University. I was very proud of that, because I was like, you have to have some standards at university. The end of that cartoon wasn’t like, oh, they’re good kids. Let’s let them stay. No, it was like, there are rules and they broke them, and these are the consequences.
At least then, that pop culture and these CSI shows and these other shows, they do show horrible consequences for bad decisions. That’s at least one thing that they do. If you watch like, Law and Order or CSI, it’s always like these kids making horrible decisions and then horrible things happening to them. Maybe the silver lining of this is that maybe it can scare kids. Maybe not.
Vince: I’ve always said that it’s — 90% of the people are good people. They make a mistake.
Regina: Yeah.
Vince: Some own up to it, some don’t. It’s the 10% of the people that cause 90% of our problems.
Regina: Yeah.
Vince: It’s really a small minority of people that really cause heartache and discontent in the community and cause problems.
Regina: In any community you are saying?
Vince: Yeah, anywhere.
Regina: This 10%.
Maili: It might be smaller, let’s hope.
Vince: Well, you gotta look at everything from domestic violence to heroin addiction to theft, which is caused by the heroin addiction. There’s a huge problem in our state with heroin abuse, which spurs property crimes. That’s how they make their living to buy their next high.
Regina: Do you think that’s really portrayed properly in the media in pop culture and stuff? People’s perceptions of who actually is doing these things?
Vince: No. They’re high school kids, they’re moms and dads that do it. It’s a sad thing, but they get hooked on prescription meds first, and then it leads to the heroin, because it’s just another opiate. They can’t get the other opiate legally, so let’s get the illegal one. You wouldn’t even know it. You probably run into students all the time that are on heroin. They maintain it until it gets out of control.
Maili: Think about some of the better TV series in the past couple years. Drugs are kind of glorified. That’s something that Vince and I deal with on a daily basis. In court is where I deal with it. He deals with it on the street. That’s super depressing.
Vince: They show up to court strung out.
Maili: All the time.
Vince: All the time. It’s like, this guy’s high.
Maili: Or drunk. I had someone twice the legal limit yesterday.
Regina: If we want to finish up this pop culture segment, is that why some people don’t watch who actually do the profession, as a lawyer or a police officer — do they not watch those shows because it’s kind of depressing?
Vince: Yeah.
Maili: Yeah, I think that’s the answer.
Regina: That’s why you should watch Brooklyn 99. I feel like they should give me money, because that show is not depressing.
Maili: It is a great show. But again, there might be people who are listening who are like, you know what, I don’t like police officers, I don’t like prosecutors. They’re the worst. But someone has to do this job and Vince does a really good job at keeping our streets safe and a lot of people probably don’t like that because they’re gonna get tickets.
In my office, I always try to think about a couple things. I care about accountability, behavioral change, and deterrence. That’s kind of what — I deal with each case I look at, including traffic infractions. How do I make it so that this person either learns their lesson and doesn’t come back — because I don’t ever want to see people again. I know Vince doesn’t either, I’m sure.
Vince: Yeah. It’s very seldom that I get the same person twice.
Regina: That’s actually refreshing though.
Vince: It does happen, but it’s seldom. I got one lady who was like every week, same time, same place. Like, have you not learned I sit here?
Regina: Are you friends now?
Vince: She was kind of weird. She was like, “I think we’re dating.” Like, no. No we’re not. “Are we dating now, because you’ve stopped me three times.”
[Laughing.]
I said, “No. The first time you’re talking on your phone. The second time, you’re talking on your phone and speeding.”
Regina: It just escalates.
Vince: Yeah, it’s like, you’re getting worse.
Maili: I feel like I want to end on that.
Regina: Well, I want to say thank you. I don’t hate police officers and prosecutors, because I feel if I did, I would get in trouble right now. But, I do want to thank you for coming all the way over here, because this is not your jurisdiction — and for driving all the way here, and showing me the devices. I just want to say thank you.
Vince: Well, you’re welcome. Thanks for having us.
Regina: I had a good time.
Vince: I hope your listeners had a good time.
Regina: Keep in mind listeners. Hire an attorney and speeding kills.
Maili: How do you beat a ticket?
Regina: How do you beat a ticket?
Vince: Don’t get one to begin with.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ Radar gun
♪ With my brand new radar gun
♪ Brand new shiny Simmons radar gun
Regina: Thank you for joining us. We just spoke with Officer Vince Sainati and prosecutor Maili Barber about the science of speeding. If you missed any of the show, go to our website, KMRE.org and click on the podcast link.
Our show is entirely volunteer run, and if you would like to help us out, click on the button “Donate.” Today’s episode, the science of speeding, was produced in the KMRE Spark Radio Studios located in the Spark Museum on Bay Street in Bellingham.
Our producers are Eric Fabureta [sp?] and Nathan Miller. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and our feature song today is Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets.
[♪ Radar Gun by The Bottle Rockets ♪]
♪ With my brand new radar gun
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground