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We first encountered the following warning about a supposed 30-day state police speeding ticket frenzy employing unmarked patrol cars in mid-May 2005, when it came to us as an e-mail purporting to detail information gleaned from a State trooper in south Jersey. At that time the crackdown was said to be scheduled to begin throughout the state of New Jersey on Monday, May 2, 2005: No news outlets reported a 30-day round-up of speeders in New Jersey in May 2005. New Jersey state troopers were issuing considerably more speeding tickets immediately after March 2005 than they had been previously, but that increase was the result of the state's hiring additional officers, not the product of a short-term effort to raise revenue, according to a July 20 report in the Star-Ledger: Nonetheless, this same basic warning has been recirculated on the Internet every year since then, sometimes multiple times per year, in versions listing different states and different dates (see more examples below). These repetitions all follow a pattern of announcing a 30-day speeding ticket frenzy (often said to be called Operation Yellowjacket), naming the state (or city/county) in which it will take place, listing a date on which the frenzy will supposedly commence, and identifying particular motorways which will allegedly be a focus of traffic enforcers. Although state troopers will sometimes engage in traffic enforcement details (lasting from a few hours to a few days) which involve extra patrols on targeted highways, we have yet to encounter any case in which one of the unannounced, statewide 30-day speeding ticket frenzies warned about in email forwards and social media posts actually took place. When states do engage in multi-agency efforts to combat drunk and speeding drivers, such as the H.E.A.T. (Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic) program or the I-80 Challenge Highway Safety Initiative, those efforts are typically publicly announced in advance, since two major components of traffic safety programs are motorist awareness of police presence and driver education, and neither of those aspects is facilitated through a secret police crackdown. In July 2005, the suspect New Jersey warning was modified into one about a particular region in Tennessee: At the end of 2005, the same warning was modified yet again to refer to Orange County in southern California: In January 2006 alone, similarly-worded fake warnings targeted residents of Texas, Michigan, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania. Two years later, in 2008, we find the warning circulating among residents of Louisville, Kentucky: In mid-April 2008, a similar warning was issued about Portland, Oregon: In August 2008 this version mixing the standard 30 day speeding frenzy canard with the actual Pennsylvania Operation Yellow Jacket appeared in inboxes: And in March 2009, the Pennsylvania Operation Yellow Jacket version was relocated to Michigan: The state of Michigan put a disclaimer on its web site noting that no such operation was being undertaken by Michigan State Police: These alerts have continued to appear with regularity ever since, though more recently the main vectors of the hoax have been social media accounts, not forwarded emails. As recently as 2020, the New Jersey Department of Homeland Security notified residents of the state that such alerts are false and should be ignored:
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