The linked RGJ article is more than two years old, and they still haven’t corrected their egregious “discretely-marked” typo.
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Am I the only one who doesn’t understand the orange barrels?
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What to avoid getting a DUI? It’s easy, we’ve told you thousands of times how to not drink and drive. Yet I need both hands to count the number of friends who have gotten one. 
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But it still relies on other cops, e.g. in different towns, being bastards.
Are we talking speed enforcement or DUI? Because for the former, I agree with you. For the latter - getting a driver off the road who is so obviously drunk that it affects their driving? Hell yeah. That literally saves lives - often the one being arrested.
And good on them for having a phlebotomist. While breathalyzers have gotten more accurate over time, they still aren’t great. Nothing beats a BAC.
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Are USA police cars compelled to have to have markings? In the UK we have a scourge (some might say!) called…ahem… “unmarked police vehicles”, which are exactly that. Nothing at all to show that’s what the cars are. The infamous blue lights are concealed within the normal light clusters or the headlights, or little “pods” attached to the rear window or inserted in the radiator grill. They have even been known to use an unmarked tractor unit of what we in the UK call an articulated lorry (truck, in American!), cruising our motorways, so they can look down to see miscreants hand-holding their phones (which is illegal) and the like.
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Their mission is dedicated to getting as many drunk drivers off the roads as possible, and it seems to be working. The strike team has made 1,264 arrests so far this year, compared to the 992 from 2019.
This… is not good statistics. Yes, there’s more arrests, but we also have a massive variable unaccounted for: covid. I can imagine a lot of reasons why covid has increased drunk driving (though it could also be less). But either way these number of arrests proving that using a different type of car is working seems highly spurious.
No, we also have unmarked cars. They are often still easy to spot, though, because of the limited subset of models chosen by police fleets and the modifications to even the unmarked vehicles. Light bars are a giveaway but not universal; I tend to look for the ubiquitous driver-side spotlight:
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That cow-catcher on the front is a dead give away, too.
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Yup, I think this is a common skill. My friends and I can all pick ‘em out day or night at this point. Around here it’s Ford Crown Victorias.
As another poster said, CHP claims to not have unmarked cars, but they do have a lot of Crown Vics that are completely white with no bumpers or lights visible. They have extra antennas and the CHP decal on the door. Very easy to miss unless, again, you’ve practiced the art of spotting Crown Vic headlights behind you.
A friend of mine drives an actual Crown Vic (not a very common model) and she says people slow down and pull over in front of her all the time. 
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I used to hate those private Crown Vics with the spotlight, but now they are so rarely (never?) police vehicles around here I no longer bother. It’s all Chargers, Explorers, and dark blue Chevy Avalanches for the stateys.
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Yes. It’s a skill I began refining at age 16 when I got my license and first car. My home state invested a lot in unmarked cars and speed patrols back in the 1990s. I have a lead foot and drove a lot. It was necessary to hone my awareness.
I could not do this while drunk, but I won’t be driving if so.
If we consider only speed traps, I have two words: Radar detector. While not foolproof, mine has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in ticket fees and insurance premiums over the years. Fortunately, cities along the Front Range in Colorado now rely on parked speed vans instead of actual patrols in most areas. Those tickets are a civil infraction, not really enforceable. The folks who don’t know that keep the heat off by paying them without question.
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Yah a lot of people buy them at auction, with the A-pillar light still installed. I always found it interesting that they resold them with that one piece of equipment still there. Sometimes they’re still paint B&W too.
Increasingly CHP is moving to those newer Dodge Chargers, so it’s definitely unwise to assume anything. I’ve long since given up speeding anyway. The risk/reward ratio on it is terrible once you analyze it with wiser middle-aged eyes.
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True. Oregon has really weird speed laws, though. They set nominal limits quite low, but have vague wording in the speeding laws that allow near infinite speeding if it’s with the flow of traffic. The signs don’t even read “Speed Limit X”, it just says “Speed X” and implies it’s the limit.
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The mention about empty cop cars was only for speed control. My broader point though was about safety over punishment. A story about police using a new policy/tech that reduces violence (which drunk driving is) should be celebrated. A story about cops arresting/fining/punishing more people without even lip service as to whether there is a concomitant increase in safety I think should be met with a reminder that the job is about public safety not public punishment.
The most obvious policy to reduce drunk driving is increasing volume and encouraging use of public transport. Decreasing police visibility (which is the only point of these cars) seems, to me at least, to be about increasing revenue from fines without caring whether it actually increases public safety or not.
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Black painted steel wheels are a good giveaway.
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I had a coworker who bought a decommissioned police car. It was a Crown Vic that had no longer had roof lights or decals but was still painted black and white. She had the same kind of experiences as your friend. She also told about a time when she pulled into the parking lot of a bar and saw people quickly throw their beers on the ground because they didn’t want to get busted for open container while drinking in the parking lot.
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There are some plastic boxes where sometimes a speed trap is placed so cops could fine speeders.
A speed radar is expensive, so sometimes towns are putting empty orange shells, but the fact these are fake speed traps is easily spotted.
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What’s the controversy about ghosted vehicles? If they are doing their job — arresting drunk drivers, ticketing speeding drivers — that’s a win for everybody.
And how are ghosted vehicles news? They’ve been doing this for decades.
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My parents had a Crown Vic, quite fun to drive on the highway, it was silver, but we always had people getting out of our way 
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