Police chief discusses newly launched speed watch program

The Oswego Police Department spends much of its time trying to get motorists to slow down.

“We did over 11,000 traffic stops last year and nearly half of them were for speeding,” Oswego Police Chief Jason Bastin said. He said this year the department has already done more than 3,500 speeding stops.

Not surprisingly, the department gets many complaints from residents about people speeding through their neighborhoods. Residents experiencing speeding problems in their neighborhoods will now be able to work to help reduce the problem.

The department recently announced the launch of a speed watch program where residents can apply to borrow a radar unit from the Oswego Police Department free of charge for a week.

“We know speeding is an ongoing problem,” Bastin said. “This program allows the public to help us solve that problem.”

The radar unit is actually a lidar unit. Radar uses radio waves and the Doppler effect to compute how fast vehicles are traveling, while lidar uses infrared light.

“They have much more pinpoint accuracy,” Bastin said. “They’re quicker.”

Residents are only allowed to use the unit while on their property and the recorded information will be provided to the police department. Police have the option to send the vehicle owner a letter informing them of the observed violation and encouraging them or other drivers of their vehicle to adhere to posted speed limits.

They will be able to use the unit to record the speed and license plate numbers of speeding vehicles on their street. But they first need to get support from their fellow neighbors.

“One of the things you have to do is get seven of your neighbors to sign a form that we provide agreeing that there is a speeding problem,” Bastin said. “We don’t want a situation where we have a conflict between one neighbor and another neighbor. Someone could use this to kind of harass one of their neighbors.”

Bastin noted other police departments have implemented similar rules in their speed watch programs. The speed watch program is an extension of a program that was started through the Oswego Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association.

Those are residents that have gone through the Oswego Citizens Police Academy.

“One of the things that we can have them do is to go out and run radar,” Bastin said. “They’re doing a very similar thing to what this program is, where they’re just recording data. They’re not taking any kind of enforcement action. We have in the past sent out letters to people just saying, ‘Hey, your vehicle was recording speeding on this road. Please slow down.’ It’s not a ticket or anything. I guess you would call it a courtesy letter.”

Those who want to participate in the speed watch program will have to go through a training program with the traffic sergeant. As part of the training program, they will be told they can’t make verbal comments or gestures to motorists as they are driving by.

“We also highly recommend they work in pairs,” Bastin said. “It’s better if there’s two of them there for the data collection.”

The speed watch program will help to determine if there is actually a speeding problem in a neighborhood.

“You can stand in your front yard and it may look like a vehicle is speeding, but maybe they’re not,” Bastin said. “The other thing this program does is it gives citizens real time feedback on what vehicle speeds look like. When you see a car coming around a corner, you might think that car is going 30 mph an hour and then you look at what the device is recording and it’s maybe going 26 mph.”

Bastin said the overwhelming majority of Oswego residents live on residential neighborhood streets where the posted speed limit is 25 mph.

More information about the speed watch program is available at oswegoil.org/speedwatch.