KENNEBUNK (AP) – Recipients of speeding tickets on the Maine Turnpike may cry foul, but state police insist there’s nothing wrong with officers posing as surveyors or construction workers in an aggressive strategy to get drivers to slow down.

“It’s not entrapment, it’s just unconventional enforcement,” said Lt. Randall Nichols of Troop G, the branch of the Maine State Police in charge of patrolling the turnpike.

Over the past few years, the Maine Turnpike Authority, state police, and contractors working to widen the highway have tried various methods to slow traffic.

Rather than work individually, troopers now team up in groups of four or five that take to the road together, three days a week.

The plan involves disguise. One method involves a trooper wearing a neon orange vest, with a laser gun atop a camera tripod.

Another scenario may involve a nondescript vehicle pulled off the side of the road with hazard lights blinking. Instead of stranded motorists, the vehicle contains troopers working the radar gun and police radio.

One officer works the radar, and the other radios the make, model, speed and lane of a vehicle to a team of “chase vehicles” lined up, out of view, on the side of the highway or on-ramps.

Troopers in the chase vehicles take turns pulling over cars and trucks, writing tickets, and returning to the end of the line to repeat the drill again.

During the first 30 minutes of a detail last Thursday in Kennebunk, troopers pulled over 10 drivers.

Trooper Charles Granger, who recorded the speeds called out by Cpl. Edmund Furtado, described the morning as slow.

“Memorial Day weekend, we worked Exit 6 northbound with a construction facade. We had 10 troopers on the off ramps, and pulled over 100 vehicles in four hours,” he said.

While use of unmarked cruisers to pull over speeders is nothing new, Nichols says this is the first time that troopers in Maine have dressed up as construction workers or surveyors.

He said police agencies in California, Florida and Maryland have employed similar techniques.