TexasCHLforum.com

AFCop,

I just wanted to correct one very common misconception about Texas speed laws. The law is the section quoted earlier (TC 545.351). The correct charge is speeding. There is no other law such as unsafe speed in Texas, at least as a state law.

What confuses many people is the title to section 545.352, Prima Facie Speed Limits. This section establishes that the posted speed limit is considered to be prima facie evidence of the maximum speed that is reasonable and prudent for that section of road. In other words, it is not truly illegal to go faster than the posted speed limit, you just need to be able to prove that what you did was both reasonable and prudent.

As a side note, I wrote a lot of speeding tickets in San Antonio before we were issued radar guns. When I first started there, only the traffic section had radar in the cars. The rest of us on patrol were still expected to enforce traffic laws, including speeding. I always thought it was only reasonable to write a ticket to someone if I could follow them for more than 1/10th of a mile and them not see me behind them as they sped. They were clearly not paying enough attention to surrounding traffic for the speed they were going then.

Currently, Texas has no legal requirements for an officer to be able to run radar or lidar. It is generally better, and most departments write it in policy, for the officer to have been trained in the proper use. Other wise, they make very poor witnesses. There is a section of law that requires training as specified in the occupations code. But, since the code does not require any specific training in the area, TCLEOSE has no training requirement either. There is an AG opinion that says this section of the law is basically null since all officers have met the training requirement if there is no requirement.