Man Drove With Mask-Wearing Mannequin To Use Carpool Lane In California: Police

Authorities in California caught a man traveling in the carpool lane on the 210 Freeway in Glendora last week with a mask-wearing mannequin in the passenger's seat.

The California Highway Patrol said an officer driving next to the car noticed the passenger wasn’t moving and pulled the driver over. The officer suspected the passenger wasn't a real person and pulled the driver over for tinted windows, California Highway Patrol officer Rodrigo Jimenez told FOX 5.

Upon closer look, the officer realized the passenger was actually a mannequin. The driver told the patrol officer he had been driving with the dummy for a year and a half before getting pulled over, NBC Los Angeles reported.

The driver was then given a ticket for carpool violation.

The California Highway Patrol shared a photo of the dummy on its Facebook page, saying, “by far, one of the best dummies we have ever seen.”

In the photo, the mannequin can be seen wearing a mask, a Cleveland Indians hat and a red flannel shirt. It even had wrinkles on the face.

California is one of the states — along with New York and Florida — to have a dedicated police unit to patrol highways for people driving with dummy passengers in the high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. Other police departments try to deter such drivers by publicly shaming them on social media, according to a Wall Street Journal report from 2019.

The California Highway Patrol caught a man driving with two fake passengers in his car in 2019. The patrol then reminded people that blow-up dolls, dummies, pets and ghosts don’t count as passengers.

Last year, a man in Arizona was pulled over and given a penalty ticket after a trooper noticed a skeleton wearing a camouflage bucket hat in the passenger seat of the car.

Meanwhile, the police in India deployed mannequins in 2019 to deter traffic offenders. In the southern city of Bangalore, the police said they didn’t have enough flesh and blood officers to man all the junctions. City police commissioner Bhaskar Rao said then the officers used a tactic — where the mannequins would be swapped with actual police officers — to keep drivers on their best behavior.