Today most radar units are extremely accurate.
There are some conditions that must be met however, and the conditions are as follows:
The road must be flat and straight.
There has to be good visibility.
There needs to be a minimum of traffic
The officer has to be properly trained to interpret false signals generated by the equipment. Its very rare to find these four conditions existing at the same time. There are a lot of errors that can happen in routine traffic radar operations.
The national Bureau of Standards tested the six radar units most often used by police departments. All of them produced signals that were false from police radios or CD units. All of the units produced panning errors, when used either out or in of the police cars. There were shadowing errors that appeared on all the units when the police cars speed was added to the targeted vehicles speed.
24 models were tested by the International Association of Chief's of Police for five different manufacturers. Those results were even worse than that conducted by the National Bureau of Standards. In spite of the errors found, none of these units were dropped from use. Some of these units are still probably in operation around the country today.
Panning - This happens when the hand held unit is swept across the dashboard of the car or the control unit mounted to the dash of the car.
2. Mechanical interference - the a/c or heating fan in the police car, alternator, ignition noises, rotating signs near the roadway, anything mechanical that is operating in the vicinity of the roadway can throw off the readings.
3. Shadowing - all moving radar units have this problem since the targeted speed is calculated by subtracting the speed of the police car from the closing speed of the target.
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