Police using a decoy to catch distracted drivers
Posted February 14, 2014 12:18 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
LOWER MAINLAND (NEWS1130) – Undercover RCMP officers have been staked out today, trying to catch distracted drivers, and they’re coming up with new ways to do it.
They were out in one community today, using an old police cruiser disguised as a broken-down taxi. An officer at the cab tips off members down the street, who catch the drivers and issues tickets worth $167.
Corporal Robert McDonald says too often, they hear excuses like “It’s just a quick call” or “I promise, it’s an emergency.”
He says that does not justify picking up the phone “because if you take two minutes to pull off to the side of the road… the same situation will exist in two minutes… there’s no reason to pick up a phone while you’re driving.”
“You have to understand that a vehicle is a very heavy piece of metal travelling at over 50 km/h; it takes a fraction of a second to get into an accident. If in that fraction of a second you need to react, then you’re paying attention to your phone as opposed to your driving. The consequences are horrific.”
Distracted driving is slowly becoming the number one cause of fatal crashes on our roads. Jill Blacklock with ICBC says a social shift is needed to make that kind of behaviour unacceptable.
“We’ve heard the statistics before: You’re four times more likely to be involved in a crash if you’re talking on a handheld phone and you’re 23 times more likely to be involved in a crash if you’re texting while you’re driving. Those statistics really speak for themselves.”
“It’s a behaviour that puts everybody on the road at risk,” she adds.
Last year alone, officers handed out 48,000 distracted driving tickets in BC.
