Trooper Doug Cropper writes the most tickets to motorists of any of the 30 troopers assigned to the State Police barracks in Gray.

From May 2003 to April 2004, that was 756 tickets. The state could see $146,000 from his fines.

That’s three times the average trooper salary, $40,000 more than the second-most-ticketing officer in Troop B.

He didn’t even know it.

The Sun Journal spent 12 days this summer in Gray examining a year’s worth of traffic summonses by State Police there.

Uncovered:

The speed traps in Oxford, Androscoggin and Cumberland counties.

The most common time to get a ticket, most common day of the week, most common color of car.

How fast over the limit speed is too fast to avoid trouble.

Who wrote the most tickets.

Cropper patrols 30 miles of I-295 from Scarborough to Topsham from midnight to 8 a.m. most days of the week. He’s been on the force four years, on this beat 18 months.

“There are nights when no one’s doing a thing. Everyone’s doing the speed limit, you can’t even get a plate light out,” says Cropper, 6’5″ and a former athlete. “In the wintertime, during a snowstorm, my god it’s slow.”

Somehow, he managed to write those tickets anyway. He’s got a personal goal of five a night.

Lt. Ron Harmon has led Troop B for 12 years. He’s heard all the rumors about ticketing:

• That there’s a quota. (There isn’t, he says, although the research shows slightly more tickets written the last week of the month than the first.)

• That officers get a cut of the tickets they write. (They don’t. All fines go to the state’s General Fund.)

• That Maine troopers are more apt to ticket out-of-staters. (Fifteen percent of drivers ticketed by Harmon’s troopers weren’t driving cars with Maine plates. Put in perspective, about 40 percent of all tolls collected annually on the Maine Turnpike come from out-of-state cars.)

“We’re from out of state, we’re being targeted.’ You can’t tell people any differently,” sighs Harmon.

• That it’s pretty safe to go 10 miles an hour over the speed limit without being nabbed. (Seems some rumors are true. Only 2 percent of all the speeding tickets were to drivers going over the speed limit by less than 10 miles an hour.)

• That younger officers ticket more liberally.

(Well, maybe there is something to that too. Eighteen State Police troopers in Gray wrote at least 100 tickets last year. Only three of them had seven or more years’ experience.)

“Younger guys when they start a new job, for many years, are very excited. The older you get, you calm down a bit,” says Harmon. “That’s probably true.”

Part of Cropper’s ticket-writing success is due to light traffic at night. It’s easier to pinpoint speeders and safer to pull them over. Plus, people are bolder when they think no one’s around.

He drives with his left hand on the wheel, his right hand wrapped around the remote control for a radar gun that can zap speeders one-quarter-mile away, either coming toward him or up behind him.

“I’m still in the honeymoon period. It takes some time to get sour,” says Cropper. He used to teach high school gym. This is way better.

Biohazards on the job

On patrol, he likes to cruise for scofflaws while traveling the speed limit in the right-hand lane. When that gets old, he has a current favorite spot to park in Portland, where a section of guardrail ends.

Lying in wait on median strips is obvious.

On stormy nights, most cars slow down anyway. Not the guy in the red truck on a night in late July.

As he zipped by, Cropper stepped on the gas and flicked on his blues. Following a quick chat, he returned to the cruiser with the man’s license and ran his name through a laptop computer. Bold red letters came back: “WANTED.”

The man with a bad mullet, driving his girlfriend’s truck, had an outstanding warrant for contempt of court in Florida.

He’d need to be arrested, booked.

But first Cropper asked a dispatcher to phone Florida and see if they’d come get their man.

A minute later, that state’s answer: No.

He wrote a summons for going 20 miles over. Mr. Mullet probably drove off wondering what took so long. The cost of a plane ticket changed the course of his night.

“Too bad,” says Cropper, back in the car.

When people are arrested, they aren’t transported to jail in the backseat of his cruiser anymore. They sit right in the passenger seat, handcuffed. No wire or Plexiglas barrier.

Two years ago Cropper arrested a drunk man for assault who then insisted he had to go to the bathroom. The options: Pull his pants down for him or uncuff his hands – and risk letting the guy take a swing.

So the trooper told him to hold it.

The man peed right through the passenger seat. Cropper tacked on a charge of criminal mischief. The car was declared a biohazard, the seat tossed.

That episode ticked him off. “It’s gross. This is our office, this is our work space.”

Ticket to ride

The Gray barracks is in a modest single-story building along Route 26. Each trooper has a work zone within the three counties and the strip on I-295. (Another barracks covers the turnpike.)

For the most part Harmon’s men and women don’t follow a schedule for traffic patrol; that depends on call volume.

And when it comes to summons activity, there isn’t much self-policing. Supervisors review officers monthly reports for quality. “That’s about it,” says Harmon. “There’s no nitty gritty. Red cars, blue cars, they don’t get into that.”

Copies of old summonses are kept in cardboard boxes in the basement. Stacks are loosely clipped together by officer, by month, mixed with gas receipts, manila warning cards and sometimes-ugly handwriting.

In the last year troopers at the barracks wrote 5,742 tickets, way more to men than women.

Most were for speeding, then for no insurance, then for no inspection sticker.

One officer ticketed a go-cart cruising Route 119 in Minot. (Unregistered vehicle and suspended license.)

Another: an 11-year-old boy out for a Monday morning spin through Freeport in a white sedan. (Driving without a license.)

Troopers work four days on, two days off, an irregular schedule.

So Harmon isn’t sure why more tickets got handed out on Tuesdays, according to research. Or the fewest on Mondays.

He isn’t surprised by the second-most-common violation – 12 percent of motorists were summonsed for no insurance – because he knows why: “A lot of folks don’t carry it with them.”

The ticket is commonly dropped when people arrive at their court appearance with proof of coverage.

The No. 1 place his officers ticketed drivers: the southbound lane of I-295 in Freeport.

It’s got a “high, high, high accident rate, especially during the winter months,” Harmon says. “It’s easy, we run a bunch of aircraft details there.”

Speeds are clocked by plane, officers on the ground are ready with the tickets.

That’s a harder spot to work just by car: With so much guardrail, officers can’t turn around and nab someone in the oncoming lane. In that stretch, Cropper says he tries to focus on the defects in the cars coming up behind him – expired registration, no seat belts in use, improper plates.

Off the turnpike, officers again ticketed the most cars on stretches with heavy traffic and accident patterns.

• In Androscoggin County: Route 4 in Turner, Route 136 in Durham and Route 202 in Greene.

• In Oxford County: Route 26 in Paris, Route 5 in Lovell and Route 108 in Canton.

• In Cumberland County: Route 302 in Naples, Casco and Raymond, Route 26 in Gray and Route 113 in Baldwin.

Women hold more licenses in Maine than men, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. But in the Gray tickets, like statewide convictions, 70 percent of the violations were written for men.

Fords got the most tickets, then Chevys. Ford and Chevy are 1 and 2 in popularity in Maine.

Blue cars got the most tickets – and that’s the most popular color for passenger cars in Maine, by a hair.

The hour with the most tickets: 10 a.m. According to the Department of Transportation, the peak traffic hour on I-295 is between 6 and 7 p.m., measured in South Portland.

The hour with the least traffic is 3 to 4 a.m., the same hour Gray officers wrote the fewest tickets.

View from the right

On the same night as Mr. Mullett’s stop, Cropper spots Trooper John Kyle II parked in a crossover and sidles up to his cruiser. The men roll down their windows and talk schedules, promotions and golf.

Cropper would like to get off the midnight shift. It’s hardly ideal for married life. But it does leave daylight hours to play.

“How do you hit the ball, high or low?” asks Kyle.

Twenty minutes later, Cropper stops a young man driving 14 miles over the speed limit in a silver vehicle with huge spoilers. That’s the style, Cropper says. Like “The Fast and the Furious.”

He always approaches stopped cars on the passenger side. It surprises people, he says. Sometimes they leave things lying in plain sight, like alcohol or rolling papers. He’s seen video of officers being hit with their own cars after motorists rammed into the cruisers from behind.

Cropper wears a microphone under his shirt connected to a video camera in the cruiser to capture sight and sound at each stop. His tone of voice is all business. The speeding young man apologizes.

“What’s in the brown bag?” asks Cropper, training his flashlight through the window.

Hot Pockets. Safe enough.

The driver’s got no priors, and Cropper notes that he’s acting respectful. He writes a warning.

He’s had men cry to get out of tickets. Women have told him he’s cute.

Doesn’t work.

Neither, most of the time, do the common excuses. “I’m late for work.” “I’m late to the airport.” “I have to go to the bathroom.” “I have to get to the methadone clinic.”

Cropper waits to pull back onto the road until the silver car has taken off. He always does that, too. (“It gives them time to get going and stew and moan and bitch about me.”)

Whenever he makes out a ticket, he uses those next few minutes to sit in the car and write notes on the back of the summons. What was the weather like, what did the driver say. Anything he might need to recall if the person contests the ticket and Cropper has to testify in court.

“I should not have been going that fast.’ That’s (an) admission of guilt. That’s going in my notes,” he says after another stop. “If they tell me to go **** myself, that goes in my notes.”

Since April, Cropper’s gotten even better at his job.

Since April, they haven’t seen him coming.

That’s when he got a new unmarked car. The troop has two.

Blue lights in the windows are as thin as the spine of an Augusta phone book. He’s masked a small radar gun in the back window with a snippet of his wife’s pantyhose and tossed baseball caps back there just trying to look ordinary.

He knows a trooper who put a knit shawl in his back window, going old person incognito.

Cropper has the first unmarked to try a random-number conservation license plate. It had become common knowledge, he says, that lots of unmarked car plates ended in IN.

“It’s just another way to change your stealthiness,” he says.

His vehicle is outfitted with a laptop hooked to the Internet and access to driver information for all 50 states.

There’s a tiny printer on the passenger seat floor, a console with light controls and books of fines.

“With this car, you aren’t looking for cheap pinches, you’re looking for the high speeds, the driving to endanger,” he says. Since getting the Ford Crown Victoria – he’d like to keep its color a secret – Cropper’s written more than 100 tickets a month.

He may write twice as many tickets this year as last.