Imagine you’re cruising along the highway when you see blue lights in your rearview mirror. You pull over, and when the officer in the cruiser gives you a ticket for texting while driving, you ask, “I didn’t even see you. Where were you hiding?” The officer smiles and reveals, “My colleague actually spotted you from the cab of an undercover semi truck.”

This is a situation residents of multiple states — including Illinois — could face this summer. The Illinois State Police partner with the Illinois Trucking Association so officers can ride shotgun in big rigs and jot down the license plate numbers of anyone texting while driving.

Matt Hart, executive director of the ITA, said of the “Trooper in a Truck” program, “We just, from time to time, work with the Illinois State Police… It’s a safety campaign that we do from time to time — no real structure to dates.” Translation: you never know when the semi truck next to you has a police officer riding along.

ISP District 6 Commander Gregg Cavanaugh added, “You sit in that cabin, you have a greater vantage point to look down into personal vehicles… In essence, it gives our troopers a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on inside those passenger compartments of vehicles traveling on the interstate.”

He said, “I guess you could say it’s undercover.”

The ISP officers in semi trucks will not be completing any traffic stops. They radio license plate information to uniformed officers in marked cruisers who are waiting up ahead. The goal of the program is to reduce Illinois’ 1,000+ annual deaths related to texting and driving.