South Carolina DPS Unveils Unmarked Vehicles

The South Carolina Department of Public Safety has announced the creation of new specialized teams using unmarked, striped Dodge Chargers to help curb increasing trends of aggressive driving.

The new Area Coordinated Enforcement (ACE) teams include Highway Patrol troopers and officers from the State Transport Police. The teams were developed with a goal toward improving response times in areas of high call volumes and to reduce serious injury and fatal collisions statewide. Working with the South Carolina Department of Transportation, SCDPS uses its long-range Strategic Highway Safety Plan to guide enforcement efforts to areas most impacted by fatalities and collisions as well as in-house real-time dashboards and heat maps to show where those collisions are occurring and where additional enforcement is needed.

“During the past year, South Carolina has followed national trends of increased highway collisions, injuries, and fatalities,” SCDPS Director Robert Woods IV said. “We also have seen a disturbing increase in aggressive driving behaviors, including speeds of over 100 mph, tailgating, drunken, or drugged driving and road rage — all of which are unacceptable.”

To help curb these dangerous behaviors, the ACE Teams will use crash data and specialized resources to direct the agency’s traffic enforcement efforts to areas of the state where they are needed most. This approach will feature a mix of marked and unmarked vehicles. The new unmarked Chargers feature an assortment of body and stripe colors that allow troopers to blend in with traffic to better detect and enforce aggressive driving behaviors causing injuries and fatalities.