Craig Sroka is an officer on the Coventry, Rhode Island, Police Department. In his spare time, he answers questions about policing on his TikTok (@CSroka). A commenter asked if slamming on your brakes after you see a police car parked by the highway could save you a ticket. Officer Sroka said, “Yes,” but not for the reason you might think.

“When you clock me at 80 and I slam my brakes on to drop down to 40 does it make you laugh every time?”

“When you clock me at 80 and I slam my brakes on to drop down to 40 does it make you laugh every time?”

It’s amusing to imagine Officer Sroka parked just out of sight, around a bend in the highway, watching as one speeder after another sees him and slams on their brakes for fear of a ticket. Honestly, I could believe the same scenario repeating itself 100 times in a shift. Officer Sroka confirmed, “This happens often and I like the acknowledgement.”

Can you fool police radar?

He doesn’t suspect you could fool a police officer by slowing down once you’ve seen each other. “As soon as we see you, we’ve already clocked your speed five times over… depending on the angle, we can already pick you up, but we don’t see your car yet.”

Officer Sroka admits that often, just clocking a speeder on his radar isn’t enough information to decide whether to pull them over.

If you don’t slow down before passing him, Sroka assumes one of two things: You don’t care, or you’re going too fast to even notice him. And he’s happy to pull over both groups.

So how would he describe the first group? “It’s those cars that go by me at 65, 70 when the speed is only like 35 miles an hour. And then they don’t even attempt to slow down.”

And the second group: “It’s those ones that go by me and my cruiser shakes because they never even saw me on the side of the road.”

Officer Sroka says of these unrepentant speeders, “Those are the ones that I address most of the time.” And by “address” he means write a ticket.

How pumping the brakes might get you out of a ticket

Officer Sroka says, “It’s too late by the time you see us, we already have you on radar. But yeah, I like when people acknowledge that. They’re going faster than the speed limit, they see us, then I just see the numbers like drop rapidly.”

By “like” it, Sroka means that he’s confident he’s done his job and made the highways safer, just by parking alongside them. So what does he do when he doesn’t give a speeding car a ticket? “I’ll just give a flicker of the light to be like, ‘Thank you or I’m glad you saw me and you corrected your speed.’ For the most part, that’s what I’m looking for.”

You can see the original TikTok video embedded below:

@csroka Replying to @Incognegro #speed #police #cops #fyp ♬ original sound – Craig Sroka