Can I tell you how thrilled I was a few days ago when I opened an email from Nashua police and started reading the attachment?

While we receive a fair number of communications from Nashua, state, and two or three neighboring police departments, notifying us of a significant arrest, a crash, or a missing or wanted person they are looking for help from the public to identify, I don’t think I’ve ever broken into a wide smile or uttered an emphatic “yes!” upon reading one of these communications.

There were three emails in all on the subject, the first from Nashua police Lt. Jennifer Moriarty who began by noting that the department “has been receiving multiple complaints regarding speeding vehicles and aggressive driving … .”

Suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone, that there are plenty of drivers out there who, just like me, have grown increasingly frustrated, not to mention anxious, with the self-centered, me-first characters who make sure to don their figurative blinders before jumping into their missle of choice, firing it up and seeing how many “slow pokes” — i.e., safe, law-abiding drivers — they can play NASCAR with before coming right up on their tail before whizzing past them at the next exit — preferably, passing them on the right, because you’re supposed to pass other vehicles on the left.

The more of Moriarty’s email I read the bigger I smiled. What she was describing was much more than sending an officer or two out to a problem area with a radar gun for a couple of hours.

And anytime a law-enforcement initiative or comprehensive operation is given a name, you know it means business.

Welcome, Operation Commuter Shield.

To say its debut last Monday — the “pseudo-holiday” we used to call Columbus Day but now prefer to call Indigenous Peoples Day — was a success is like saying the late Vin Scully was a pretty good baseball announcer. In other words, a colossal understatement.

Operation Commuter Shield, Moriarty wrote, is a joint effort of Nashua and state police and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office.

The second email came a little later in the day, this one from state police headquarters. It was about another initiative similar to the Nashua one that took place at roughly the same time frame on I-93 over in Salem.

As I read my smile grew yet wider: “the purpose of this operation is to saturate … with enforcement action the areas that have seen an increase in speeding and aggressive driving complaints.”

The ultimate goal, state police wrote, is to “help change these types of driving behaviors.”

Number three email on this subject also came from state police, this one describing an enforcement action that ran concurrently with the other two on Monday. It focused on commercial motor vehicles and the state’s “move-over law,” the official name of which is

The Motorist Duties When Approaching Highway Emergencies law.

State police said the Salem operation, which involved troopers with the department’s Special Enforcement and Mobile Enforcement Units and its air wing, netted 71 violations in just three hours.

What stands out is nearly one-third of those violations were issued to drivers traveling faster than 90 mph — one of whom was going 100 mph.

The move-over law detail, meanwhile, was conducted by members of Troop G, the unit that handles the enforcement of motor carrier and commercial vehicle laws. It conducted its detail along the Londonderry stretch of I-93.

Of the 39 stops they made, 12 drivers of passenger cars were cited for violating the move-over law. That number falls in line with my personal observations from my travels, mainly on the Everett, I-293, Route 101, I-95 in New Hampshire and Maine and sometimes, Route 3 from the Massachusetts line to the Burlington area.

Surely there’s nothing scientific about those observations, but it does seem more people abide by the move-over law than they do the speed limit or safe lane-change practices.

What certainly didn’t surprise me, unfortunately, was the number of stops police made during the Operation Commuter Shield conducted on the Everett Turnpike Monday morning.

Officers stopped nearly 150 vehicles in roughly five hours, which comes to 30 stops per hour, or one every two minutes. Talk about easy pickins. And get this: Moriarty said “well over half” of the drivers stopped were traveling at least 20 mph over the posted 55-mph speed limit.

Time was, a vehicle going 75, 80, sometimes even 90 mph on the turnpike would command the immediate attention of even the least-observant driver, and make most of us half-expect to come upon that same vehicle down an embankment on its roof around the next bend.

To be clear, I’m far from a “slow-poke” on the roads — at least by its conventional definition. But sometimes I’m not so sure, like when one of those shiny, sharp-looking pickup trucks on steroids I’d love to own myself suddenly fills my rearview mirrors with what seems like a million candlepower’s worth of headlights, driving lights, courtesy lights and running lights.

Wait. I’m going almost 65 in a 55. I’m not a slow-poke. I’m just a garden-variety (fairly) safe driver, albeit a temporarily blinded one.

And the offenders are certainly not limited to those who need a step-stool to get themselves into the driver’s seat. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been cruising along minding your own business, when suddenly you hear a sort of hollow, buzzing-like sound that gets louder, and louder, until an object, usually colored bright red, fiery orange, lemon-yellow or lime green, no more than four feet high and about two inches off the ground, suddenly appears two lanes over and disappears as fast as it appeared.

These mini-cars seem to be the vehicle of choice these days for speed-freaks, but the same result — unreasonable speed — can be accomplished from behind the wheel of a number of higher-end compact and mid-size cars.

Take a BMW 5-Series for example. State police over in Troop A encountered one of those on I-95 in the early morning hours last Tuesday.

The trooper who first saw the BMW clocked it at 118 mph, but by the time he was able to catch up to it, he discovered the driver had reached a top speed of 127 mph.

The driver? An 18-year-old kid out of Eliot, Maine.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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