Meet the new, disguised California Highway Patrol

July 1, 2025

OPINION by DANIEL BLACKBURN

I was wheeling down I-5 the other day when I saw two vehicles on the shoulder. The one in back was a small, greyish SUV; in its rear window red lights were flashing, and on its front doors were the insignias and identification of the California Highway Patrol. It was a quick view, for sure, but I knew right away what it was.

Having heard that the patrol was planning to introduce “low-profile” vehicles to its familiar black-and-white fleet, I correctly deduced this was one of the new vehicles. The stated purpose is to wander the highways of the state and surreptitiously pick off those drivers who seem intent on speed and recklessness.

Three cheers! In the last few years, I’ve noticed –and so have many others — that seemingly fewer CHP vehicles are around to catch these idiots. And traffic laws on California’s highways have certainly been progressively ignored.

Any routine journey on such a byway would bear witness to some witless driver endangering everyone around.

I guess in today’s environment these sub-rosa CHP vehicles are necessary. Who among us hasn’t wondered aloud while driving…”Never a cop around when these creeps drive like this.”

In the last decade, the CHP was largely controlled, though its funding, by a state Assembly member named Lou Papan. Papan was a great supporter of the CHP (emphasis on “great”) and his word was just plain law for that agency.

During his lengthy two-decade tenure, the Daly City Democrat flatly vetoed the use of unmarked or disguised CHP vehicles, firmly believing that high visibility of the black-and-white car was a deterrent to fast and reckless driving.

Before he retired, he gave the okay to the all-white CHP cars we occasionally see today, but only on the condition the vehicles be used exclusively for commercial truck driver compliance. That policy died eventually after Papan’s 2007 death.

Now the agency has introduced 100 little patrol vehicles that you will not see until one is on your rear bumper with red lights flashing. Crazy drivers, take notice.

I’m a bit saddened by this step, but it was necessary, I guess. It’s just another sign of a society that is undergoing transformational changes, for better or for worse.

Co-founder Daniel Blackburn can be criticized at blackburn.danielj@gmail.com.