Dane County police started cracking down on speeders Sunday, devoting six extra deputies and a supervisor to catching traffic-law violators for the rest of the month.

Sgt. Michelle Shelhamer said police can start issuing speeding tickets at 10 miles over the speed limit, but police issue tickets at their own discretion.

She said officers do not have a quota of tickets to issue that they must reach.

“People have been asking me that for years,” Shelhamer said.

Lt. Steve Sell of the Wisconsin State Patrol said the police department cannot issue quotas under state law.

“The law was enacted years and years ago, and even then we never really had quotas,” Sell said.

He said state troopers do not allocate more patrol to highways coming out of Madison when many students travel, including over school breaks and holiday weekends.

“We only have X number of people available,” Sell said. “We’ve never found students to be a big problem. The most we’ve had to deal with is car breakdowns.” Sell said police do shift troopers from other counties into Dane County for special events like the Harley Festival over the summer, however.

Sell said police use several strategies for catching speeders, including the use of radar guns by the side of the road and triangulation, where a speed computer measures the amount of time a car takes to cross a given distance. He said state troopers use speed computers in squad cars and even in airplanes to catch speeders. Although speed computers in planes are the most effective way to catch speeders, they are not used as often because they are costly to use and consume too many personnel to man the plane and catch the speeders on the ground, according to Sell.

“They are definitely not the most common way to catch speeders, and they are probably a thing of the past,” Sell said. “We did not use it extensively, but we used it as much as we could.” He said the state’s budget issues would probably make the technology obsolete.

Although drivers can now purchase technology to alert them when a patrol car is near, Sell said the equipment cannot shield the drivers from speed computers, however, because the computers do not emit a radar signal the equipment can detect.

“There are ways to get around the technology; it’s not foolproof,” Sell said. “It’s never created much of a problem.”

Police will sustain extra staff to catch speeders until May 2. Shelhamer said the county sheriff’s office periodically receives grants throughout the year from the Department of Transportation to dedicate extra officers to the county traffic.

“Because the fatality rate seems to continue to increase, we do everything we can,” Shelhamer said.