EMISSIONS:The decoy squad car is mighty effective - but it works for all the wrong reasons, writes Kilian Doyle.
HAVE YOU had the pleasure of passing the wooden cop car yet? I have. It was parked alongside a busy road in Kildare that I was slogging down during a recent monsoon.
Crikey, said I, as it loomed through the haze. What's that yoke hovering way above the grass verge? Is it a cop car? Surely not?
I slowed down. Not, you understand, because I was speeding. But rather because I'd sussed it was a fake within seconds, and was laughing so much I was in severe danger of crashing. I've heard of plastic paddies, but this is ridiculous. Is this the best they can do?
Even if I hadn't collapsed into a mixture of puerile chortling and head-shaking incredulity, I had little option but to brake, for the 20 cars in front had crawled to a halt, their drivers rubbernecking so hard you'd think they'd just seen Elvis up to mischief with a Yeti in the bushes, rather than a counterfeit blockheaded cop in a wooden car.
You'll be aware gardaí in Mayo used a decoy squad car last April Fool's Day as a joke to raise awareness about speeding. Did they neglect to tell their Kildare counterparts it was a wind-up? Granted, from a (long) distance, the decoy looks authentic enough. But once you get within 100 metres, it is exposed as a crude ruse. For, in addition to being on stilts and pointing in the wrong direction, the fake car looks comically squashed, as if it's been rear-ended by an oil tanker.
And the real giveaway? The garda - the most realistic element of the whole contraption, despite being little more than a thick plank - was grinning. Inanely.
Answer me this: what cop smiles while plonked by the side of the road with a speed gun? (Oh, all right. Some do. Mostly the sadistic ones who were bullied as kids. Hence their career choice, I suppose.)
This chap actually looked a kindly sort. Portly, ruddy-cheeked, cap tilted at a rakish angle, giggling merrily to himself. Possibly because there were 20 colleagues making rude gestures in the background while he was having his photo taken.
Driving off, I wondered how long it'd be before someone nicked it. It'd look good in a boy-racer's bedroom. Much more probable, however, is that vandals would get to it first, daubing pram wheels on the car and pigtails and a tiara on the cop. Or that some nutter with a shotgun - of whom there are many in Kildare - would use it for target practice.
But I have to admit, for all my scorn, it has the intended effect, albeit for unintended reasons. Laughing though we may have been, didn't we all slow down?
Unfortunately, its impact is fleeting. For, the second that passing motorists twig the "car" is but a lump of timber, they speed up, secure in the knowledge there isn't another garda around for miles.
So the ruse is imperfect. But not without potential. What they really need to do is deploy more realistic decoys so that motorists can never be 100 per cent certain where they stand.
Why not cart their decommissioned knackered Mondeos out of the station yards and park them on roadsides, manned by mannequins in cheap blue serge suits?
In addition to having the same deterrent effect as their flesh-and-blood colleague, these ersatz gardaí wouldn't need wages, get blue flu, lambast the top brass at annual conferences or have Paul Reynolds on speed dial. Best of all, real cops could stick nails in them and fling them into the road as makeshift stingers to stop joyriders.
More devious still, the gardaí could engage in serious skulduggery and hide real squad cars behind the decoys to nab complacent lawbreakers speeding past. These laughing fools will soon see who the real dummies are when they're dragged off to court.