file photo Boyd Loving
Road Warrior: Do police issue enough cellphone tickets?
Sunday, November 10, 2013
By JOHN CICHOWSKI
ROAD WARRIOR COLUMNIST
Hardly a week goes by that does no bring angry mail about drivers who get away with violating the ban on using hand-held cellphones behind the wheel.
“We need increased surveillance,” complained a reader from Paramus. A Hawthorne reader wants police to use unmarked cars to catch abusers. A Wanaque man wants teams of cops stationed at street corners. A man from Emerson thinks camera surveillance would stem the flood of cellphone-related crashes.
Police rarely embrace such notions, citing staffing shortages and more serious priorities for a perceived dearth of cellphone tickets. But what other traffic priority could be more serious than distracted driving? What causes more fatalities?
Too often journalists rely on police responses to such questions instead of the facts found in court records. Figures from the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts show that police are not ignoring cellphone violations. They ticketed 81,125 of them in the 12 months ended May.
That’s 1,560 a week — 192 in Bergen; 64 in Passaic.
Only a 192 in Bergen when almost every other person you see behind the wheel is on a cell phone.
Funny, the photo you used for this article is from a heroin addict who was high at the time of the crash. How about you use a photo of a crash from a cell phone user. Or do you even have one????
#2, you are nuts. Of course there are plenty of cell phone users causing accidents.