The "Certified" speedometer is interesting unto itself...
Back before radar existed, or many departments could afford to buy a radar gun, the police cars were equipped with "Certified" speedometers.
The reason they were "certified" is that when a speeding car was spotted, the police would catch up to it and drive the same speed, and record that speed for the speeding violation.
It was also a very unreliable way to determine speed of the suspect vehicle. But police cars came with "certified" speedometers up into the 70's and 80's... But most I remember went up to 140 or 150 mph.
back in college in the early 70s, I got pulled over by a cop in rural No Carolina, while driving my VW Squareback doing 65 mph, which was flat out..as it has well over 100,000 miles on the motor....Cop wrote me up for doing 80 mph... because he said he had to speed up to that number to catch up with me...
Then he takes my licenses and tells me to follow him into this town....where he tells me to sit in this room, which I did for an hour, since no one was in the police station.. the cop that pulled me over just went home and didn't tell anyone I was there...so I go into the court at 1 pm, When the Judge got back from fishing all morning... comes into court with his fishing hat, and waders and jacket full of fish hooks... puts on his black robe over that.
Since the cop wasn't there, he threw out the ticket, and tells me I had to pay court costs. Asked how much cash I had in my wallet, and I said $25.00 so that is what he made the fine... then I had to wait until they ran a back ground check on me.. which took like 4 hours.
Turns out the previous week, they had some guy in the same situation. He paid the fine and then waited for the back ground check...the system was down, so since he seemed like a nice guy, they let him go.... Report came thru and he was wanted in 7 states for bank robbery...He was from Alabama... in the mean time after they let him go, he went down and robbed the local bank of $36,000 on the way out of town...
I was the next out of state guy who had been pulled over and they weren't about to let me go until my clearance came thru, and the system not being down....
wasn't the 70s a great time!
