Police in western Canada are deploying life-size cardboard replicas of traffic cops pointing a radar gun at oncoming traffic in an effort to reduce speeding and road fatalities.
The mock-ups are so realistic that while being tested on a Vancouver street this week, a tow truck driver pulled up and started talking to one, the police said.
Eight of the cut-outs will initially be deployed on city streets. And in case some drivers are not fooled by the facsimiles, ‘there may or may not be a [real] police officer behind one of these cutouts’, the police said.
The police initiative, called Operation Silhouette, follows similar trickery used elsewhere, including ‘bait cars’ for thieves, fake intersection cameras and mechanical moose used by Canadian wildlife officers to nab poachers.
