Police Department in New Jersey is dressing up in ghillie suits to catch distracted drivers

Attention every driver in New Jersey. Don’t let the bushes fool you. A police department outside New York City has adopted an absolutely unhinged strategy to catch distracted drivers, which is dressing an officer up in a full ghillie suit, disguising him as a shrub, and having him spy on the road with a pair of binoculars.

Nothing builds trust between a community and its police force quite like an officer hiding inside a bush, pretending to be shrubbery, watching the very people he’s paid to protect. In six hours, the leafy lawmen handed out 74 citations, which is impressive and ridiculous at the same damn time.

Police Department Dresses In Ghillie Suits To Catch Distracted Drivers

Don’t let the bushes fool you. A police department outside New York City is using an unusual technique to catch distracted drivers: with an officer dressed in disguise as a shrub and using a pair of binoculars. pic.twitter.com/Wnz1itG5Hc

— ABC News (@ABC) July 31, 2026

There’s got to be a better way for the Dunellen, New Jersey police department to spend its time, right? What a genuinely ridiculous use of manpower and yet, I’m willing to also acknowledge the fact that they are actually out there doing this.

I have to respect it on some level. You dressed up in a full ghillie suit in the middle of the summer, roasting alive pretending to be a tree, and busting people for checking their phones while driving down the road.

Absolutely humiliating for the driver in question. Sometimes, you just have to take the ticket and keep it moving. I do think that if I was living in this town, I would be more distracted trying to figure out if the trees were cops than anything on my phone.

God forbid if I actually spotted one, then I have my phone out trying to take a picture of this idiot instead of keeping my eyes on the road.

That said, you really have to question the strategy here. Is the costume really necessary? The police should be in plain clothes if they really want to catch someone not paying attention on the road. A bush does the opposite. Nobody in the history of driving has ever put down their phone because a random pedestrian was standing on the sidewalk. What’s the ghillie suit accomplishing that a guy in normal clothes with binoculars couldn’t?

There has to be some middle ground between an officer in full uniform, who obviously nobody’s going to text in front of, and an officer dressed like he’s on Seal Team 6. Just a regular dude leaning against a telephone pole would catch just as many people, and he wouldn’t have heatstroke by noon.

What’s really going on here?

Trust me, I’m not that big of an idiot. I know police departments and pretty much everyone else these days do stuff like this for the story. That officer in the bush isn’t really putting a meaningful dent in distracted driving with 74 tickets in an afternoon but the concept is absurd enough that ABC News does a segment on it.

All that leads me to believe that the tickets aren’t and were never the point.

Anyway, keep your eyes on the road and your hands off your phone out there, because in New Jersey the trees have binoculars now. Stay safe, and maybe give a respectful nod to any suspiciously human-shaped shrubbery you pass.

He’s just doing his job.

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