Huh, I have never seen them aim the gun at traffic at such a significant oblique angle.
I will chalk this up to the One New Thng I Learned Today.
And it isn't lost on me that you can ask me that question, phrased as such, and get a chuckle out of me, whereas pretty much anyone else might get a slap in the face.
Well I hoped you learned two new things yesterday, because the one I taught you was surprisingly wrong.
Cop radar does not account for the angle of offset, and they're surprisingly inaccurate as that angle increases. Up to around 25° the accuracy stays within 90%, but after that it nosedives all the way to 0 at 90°. Turns out The Man has no reason to want this resolved, as the inaccuracy is always in the driver's favor. You will always be driving as fast or faster than the speed indicated on his gun, which makes this a really shitty defense in court. And since the radar is technically secondary to Johnny's, I shit you not,
training and expertise in visual speed recognition, the general inaccuracy isn't relevant. Whereas were the radar gun manufacturers to incorporate cosine differential error correction they'd be adding a whole new wrinkle to what is already a tried and true aid to conviction.
This does nothing to address why I see cops sitting at oblique angles running radar, though. Maybe they just pull over to burn one and leave the radar on for good measure. I don't know. It does tell me that you should throw your baseball just inside that nine, though.