Police in British Columbia are using unmarked vehicles with
novice-driver decals to catch unsuspecting speeders, a police
spokesman has confirmed. Constable Ian Mac-Donald admitted his force
uses the “N” and “L” magnets — used to denote trainee driver’s
levels — on its cruisers. The announcement came after a complaint
from a man in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, who saw a motorist
pulled over by an unmarked police car with an “N” decal on it.
“There’s nothing wrong with keeping the roads safe and I appreciate
that, but being sneaky like that and specifically baiting people —
in the United States it’s called entrapment,” delivery truck driver
Peter Doerksen said. “These tactics are unfair, if not illegal.” A
spokeswoman for the Insurance Corp. of B.C., the province’s public
vehicle insurance agency, said police are not violating the Motor
Vehicle Act with their gambit.