It takes a lot to surprise experienced police officers. But one Sydney driver has done just that in spectacular fashion.

Let me set it up for you.

Along with two cameramen, I’d been invited to follow a police operation on the M5 to catch drivers holding mobile phones. It’s a growing problem, and NSW police have made it a mission to crack down on this dangerous – and potentially deadly – behaviour.

So, we met Chief Inspector Phil Brooks, of the NSW Police Traffic and Highway Patrol, and a fantastic team of motorcycle officers at 7am near the King Georges Rd onramp to the M5 at Beverly Hills.

The operation is precise, but simple. An officer with a digital stills camera using a high-powered zoom lens sets up where he can see city-bound peak hour traffic and photograph drivers doing the wrong thing.

A truck driver has been caught using not one but two mobile phones while driving on Sydney's M5. (9News)

A colleague marks down the offence and number plate and relays that to a motorcycle cop who chases down and pulls over the driver.

Over the course of about 75 minutes, it goes as expected. Drivers in cars, vans and trucks are pulled over one, and sometimes two, at a time. Embarrassed, angry, or disappointed they cop their fine - $337 and 4 demerit points.

Few want to be interviewed about what they were thinking. One does – admitting he was stupid and that he will simply have to face the punishment.

Then, just as we were getting ready to wrap up, the call that stunned us all.

A driver in a small truck using two mobile phones at the same time! Two phones! One in each hand, forearms steering the car!

The call goes out across the radios. One of my colleagues calls me directly. “You won’t believe it. They just caught a bloke using two phones,” he says.

An officer with a digital stills camera using a high-powered zoom lens sets up where he can see city-bound peak hour traffic and photograph drivers doing the wrong thing. (9News)

An officer calls out: “Wow! No hands on the steering wheel!”

‘Johnny two phones’, as he’s dubbed, is pulled over. When asked just what he was thinking, he tells the police officer: “Traffic was slow. I’m trying to run my business in traffic.” Sheepishly, he tells me he knows it’s illegal.

Now, it’s easy to laugh about this. There is nothing funny about it.

Chief Inspector Brooks was rightly furious.

“He’ll get two fines for that infringement,” he told me. “But it just shows the extent of what some people are prepared to do on our roads. On a busy road like this. Not concentrating. Needing to brake. He could quite easily have gone off and had a serious crash.”

Phil Brooks knows this better than most. In recent years, he’s seen an increasing number of accidents, some fatal, caused by a driver talking or texting on a mobile phone.

Experiences police officers were shocked to catch "Johnny two phones". (9News)

In our 90 minutes on the M5, 18 drivers were caught. Half were in trucks both small and large. Two were hauling containers. The potential danger is staggering. On another occasion, police caught 60 drivers in two hours.

In the 2016/17 financial year, police caught 40,961 drivers. In the most recent financial year it went up to 42,122. It was a jump of less than 3 percent. Not much, you might say. But awareness about the danger has been increasing.

So, police are on the hunt.

“If you touch any part of your phone, you will be given an infringement,” Chief Inspector Brooks warns.

If you think I’m preaching – too right I am. I’ve almost had accidents where the other driver was holding their phone and not watching the road. Some of my colleagues have had accidents caused by such drivers. One had her car written off. I see drivers doing this every day as I drive to and from work and when I’m out shooting stories.

The State Government is taking it seriously too. From September, the infringement will attract more demerit points - five instead of four.