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Oldgringo wrote:I've not really been looking but I don't think we have any in Rusk.

They just climb up in the trees over there.

They have these all over Plano and Allen area. I am not sure how much they have deterred crime, but they are in use and intermittently staffed. As a cool note, the ones here have anemometers on them and if the wind gets above a certain speed, the system automatically lowers the unit to the trailer.

Oldgringo wrote:

RPB wrote:unmanned actually works. a while

I know police have left unmanned vehicles at certain spots with radar on everyone slowed down... worked great for a long time, then they started getting boxes of doughnuts on it, which was ok too, but then they moved it elsewhere.

True story.

The police in Lakeside, MT parked a cruiser with a blow-up dummy in it on the highway leading into town. There was only one highway passing through Lakeside, how many entrances are there to the League City Shopping CenterMall?

Around 1980 the department I was a reserve officer with put a car with a mannequin in it in uniform on a drive next to the highway. This was a real common place to run radar, and we would periodically have a real officer in it really running radar (yeah, sneaky, I know. LOL)

One Saturday it was a really hot day and I happened to be working dispatch and the desk. I received a phone call from a lady that was very concerned about the officer in the car at that location. She had noticed the officer had been sitting there with the windows rolled up and the car off, so there was no air conditioning. In addition, the 'officer' was kinda slumped over against the window and didn't move while she was watching him. I thanked her for her concern and advised I would radio the officer to make sure he was OK.

About an hour later, she called back and stated he still hadn't moved. I assured her that he was fine. She really insisted that we send a car out to check on him. Finally, I told her that she needn't worry because it was actually a decoy car and the officer was just a mannequin. She started laughing and said, 'Well, I guess it's a good thing he WASN'T moving!' She then said she was embarrassed that she had called and been so dumb about it, but hadn't gotten close enough to tell that he wasn't real. I told her she shouldn't be embarrassed and that I thought she was a wonderful lady for being so concerned about an officer out there and appreciated her compassion and thoughtfulness.

Not long after that we decided it really wasn't a big benefit, so discontinued the program, but it did work for about 6 months at different locations.