Radar Detectors Are Legal in Mississippi. Most Radar Guns Are Not.

Take the negative first and prove it from the Code rather than from silence. A full-text search of the Mississippi Code 1972 Annotated for the phrase radar detector returns zero sections. The single word detector returns four, at Sections 45-11-29, 45-11-49, 45-11-101 and 73-69-5, none of them in Title 63, which is where motor vehicle equipment lives. The word radar itself appears in Title 63 only in Chapter 3, Article 11, headed Restrictions on Speed; Use of Radar, and that article is addressed entirely to who may operate the equipment. Mississippi therefore has no detector prohibition, no mounting restriction, and no commercial-vehicle carve-out of its own.

Section 63-3-519 is the operative provision and it runs the opposite way from the laws drivers usually expect. The default is that nobody in Mississippi may purchase or use, or allow to be used, any type of radar speed detection equipment on a public street, road or highway, except the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol. Four exceptions follow. Municipal officers may use radar inside a municipality of two thousand (2,000) or more by the latest or a previous federal census, but never where the latest census puts the municipality below one thousand five hundred (1,500). A college or university campus police force may use it within a campus with more than two thousand (2,000) students enrolled. Municipal officers in a municipality over fifteen thousand (15,000) by the latest census may use it on federally designated highways inside the corporate limits. And, since House Bill 454 of 2023, municipal officers may use it on the public streets of any incorporated municipality that both holds the county seat and contains a public community college.

That last exception is the newest of three recent expansions and shows how narrowly the Legislature moves here. Section 63-3-519 was amended by 2021 Miss. Laws ch. 373, again by 2022 Miss. Laws ch. 307, and again by 2023 Miss. Laws ch. 398, House Bill 454, which was approved by the Governor on 22 March 2023 and took effect from and after its passage. The section also carries an operational duty running the other way: the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol must be immediately notified by municipal law enforcement of any road blockages or emergencies on federally designated limited-access highways inside the corporate limits.

The practical consequence for a driver is that on most Mississippi county roads and in the smallest towns there is no lawful radar at all, so a detector has nothing to detect. Sheriffs and deputies are not among the exceptions. The Highway Safety Patrol is the agency running radar on the state highway network, and municipal departments only where their population, their campus, their highway classification or their county seat and community college status brings them inside one of the four paragraphs.

Mississippi also closed off the automated alternative. Miss. Code Ann. Section 17-25-19, enacted by 2009 Miss. Laws ch. 416, bars any county board of supervisors or municipal governing authority from adopting, enacting or enforcing an ordinance authorizing automated recording equipment to enforce traffic signals or speeds, or to impose or collect any fine for such a violation, and required any equipment already in use to be removed before 1 October 2009. The definition reaches a camera working in conjunction with a traffic control signal or radar speed detection equipment.

The one real restriction on a Mississippi driver comes from federal law rather than the Mississippi Code. 49 C.F.R. Section 392.71 forbids driving a commercial motor vehicle equipped with or containing any radar detector. That applies in Mississippi as it does everywhere, but it is federal, it reaches commercial motor vehicles only, and Mississippi has enacted no state counterpart.

There is no offence for possessing or using a radar detector in a private vehicle in Mississippi, so no fine, no equipment citation and no forfeiture. The penalty in this area falls on unlawful radar use instead. Miss. Code Ann. 00), or imprisonment for not more than six (6) months, or both. That reaches an officer or an agency outside the four exceptions as squarely as it reaches a private person, since the prohibition in Section 63-3-519 is addressed to any person or peace officer or law enforcement agency.

On the automated side, Section 17-25-19 does not create a fine; it voids the local power, so an ordinance purporting to authorize speed or signal cameras is unenforceable and any fine collected under it has no statutory basis. R. 71, enforced through the federal motor carrier safety scheme rather than by Mississippi citation.