A Night With Falls' Left-Brained Officers

Note: This is the second of 13 weekly updates about your Patch editor's journey though the Menomonee Falls Citizen's Police Academy.

For everyone out there who enjoys driving through town in a vehicle with deeply tinted windows, you're taking a risk with the law.

But if you’d like to travel incognito but stay within compliance, you’ll either need to have a prescription from the doctor, or you could work on becoming a licensed Christian Science practitioner. Both are exempt from the window tint ordinance in the village.

Not really sure why a Christian Science practitioner would need tint on his ride, but it’s a reason to dodge a ticket Falls officers say they’ve never heard before. And Christian Science practitioners are the only other group they are aware of exempt from the law.

Secondly, ever wonder what those “Crash Investigation Site” signs on the highway are for? They do serve a purpose. Wisconsin operates with a “Steer It and Clear It” law. If you’re in a crash and no one is injured, and both vehicles are operable, you are both required by law to drive to the nearest crash investigation site before you contact police.

There are two such locations in Menomonee Falls.

Lastly, myself and other classmates learned what officer Jim Bowen’s speed threshold is before he’ll pull you over for excessive speeds. However, that information is classified and will stay behind the walls of the Citizen’s Academy.

Week Two of the program was our introduction the Traffic Unit. Of all the branches of the police force, these are the guys you‘ll likely find punching away at a graphing calculator and plugging numbers into formulas. They are the mathematicians of the force, and that infamous subject we either begrudgingly studied, or loved with all the capacity of the left side of our brains, bubbles up in almost everything they do.

As a right-brained writer-of-sorts, friction coefficients, centripetal force, and turning arcs are simply words that enter one ear and leave the other – completely missing any marbles rattling around in there.

But for officer Scott Bellows, sets of data come together to give him a glimpse of what happened before the hoods smashed and the glass shattered.

Based on the length of skid marks, debris from the crash, and scratches to pavement, Bellows can determine the speed at impact, and the speed before impact. After a fatal or severe injury accident, Bellows uses a laser system to plot points and map out the accident.

During class, we also received some hands-on experience with the laser and radar guns and clocked speeders on Pilgrim Road. A few tickets could have been issued based on Bowen’s threshold, but we let them slide.

Bowens is probably a bit more famous than you may realize. You can often find him along Appleton Avenue and Pilgrim Road clocking speeders while atop his Harley police motorcycle. The motorcycle is a highly efficient speed-ticket-writing machine. Bowens said he once issued about 11 citations in just over an hour.

And although most police officers will not have to draw their gun in the line of duty, Bowens draws his laser and radar guns daily. He’s also a sharpshooting, radar gun firing ace. To test the range of the speed gun, he got a reading on a truck driving about a mile away from his location. After picking up the radar gun and clumsily clocking speeders fromt roughly 30 yards away, I realized that’s one mile was quite a feat.

But here a few tips for you if you happen to find your self suddenly stopped at the side of the road for a bad case of the lead foot. Be sure to ask an officer when their radar was last calibrated. Secondly, it's not an officer's duty to show you the radar, it's the personal preference of each officer.

Although the traffic division writes a lot of citations for road violations, they are also instrumental in securing the area for festivals and other events in the village. The Falls traffic unit handles 18 events in a year, and ensures the roads are safe for all participants.

So after my class on Tuesday, my eyes are now fixed on my speedometer, as I have a new appreciation for the tools that are used to catch me if I speed - which, of course, I never do.