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Georgia Cop Issues 800 Tickets To Drivers Texting At Red Lights
McGruber writes "WSB-Television, Atlanta, tells us that Gwinnett County police officer Jessie Myers has issued more tickets for texting and driving than any other officer in the state. Officer Myers said he sees most people typing away on their phones while waiting at red lights. 'Most people think they're safe there,' Myers said. However, he said it's still illegal. 'At a red light, you're still driving, according to the law. You're on a roadway, behind (the wheel of) a car, in charge of it, with a vehicle in drive,' Myers said. Myers also tickets drivers using navigation apps. One driver said she was just using her phone's GPS. The law forbids that and Myers issued her a ticket. "That's right. You can't use your navigation while driving. Unless it is a GPS-only device, such as Garmin or Tom Tom, something that is not used as a communication device,' Myers said."
Citing them for texting, sure. Citing for using the GPS is fucking stupid. We do NOT want to revert to the days when people tried to manage folding and unfolding maps as they drove.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Good thing that the in-vehicle computers that cops use to check someone's plates isn't covered by this.
Hypocrites. Who will write them tickets?
Which is why I always put my car in [P]ark while stopped at traffic lights.
(I live in Cobb County, 2 counties over from Gwinnett and have received a ticket for "texting while driving")
You're not legally driving if your car is in park.
And I beat the ticket by forcing the cop to produce the dashcam footage. You could clearly see my reverse lights light up as the car was shifted from Park to Drive.
In fact, having a car in Park is one of the few exceptions written into the law.
A cop doing their job.
There is nothing short of an absolute, death-like issue that you need to be texting at a red light, or anywhere else while driving. Time and time again I've been behind people who were texting, the light turn greens and invariably I, or someone else, has to put on the horn to get them to pay attention to what they're doing as they're holding up traffic.
If you're that narcissistic or ADD that you think you need to be checking every ten seconds, go seek help.
Kudos to the cop enforcing the law.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
As a pedestrian I say great. People shouldn't be texting or checking their phones while driving. While folks might think it's safe at an intersection, I disagree.
I've almost been hit a number of times as drivers inch through a cross walk when they aren't paying attention. Or they turn on red and don't pay attention. It's super dangerous.
The amount of times I have missed a red light because the dickwad ahead is fucking with their phones and failed to roll on is phenomenal. By the time said dickwad has reacted to my horn, put the phone down, and moved on, the light is often changing. Don't be that dickwad.
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Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
Police have a huge amount of discretion in who they write up and for what. He could actually, y'know, work, and catch people posing some threat to those around him; but instead, he'd rather sit at a stop light and give tickets to fish in a barrel - To people at least trying to do the right thing and not text while driving (even if still technically "operating" their car).
So yeah, that still makes him a complete asshole. To all the good cops out there - This guy explains why we loathe you all so much. When you hear about shit like this, a good blanket party would do a world of wonders for your overall PR.
So a "good" cop in your mind is one who selectively enforces the law, and not one who enforces it equally?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
So all the other police aren't doing their jobs? I can understand whacking those who're texting/calling while driving; in fact I'm all for it. Red lights are iffy, ex: sometimes folks need a simple answer to pick something up along the way. But ticketing for using a phone's GPS/navigation? Dick move. Serious, serious dick move, and one that does not improve safety. In fact, it's probably safer and less distracting for my phone to vocalize directions than for me to have to look at paper maps. Even a phone's GPS map auto-tracks the vehicle and outlines the desired route, so there's less concentration needed to track where you are than on a legit paper map.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
But how many are killed because people are texting while their vehicle is stationary?
Given the fact that we all are, technically, committing scores of crimes based on technical defintions of law and regulation, I would say that judgement is a key factor for a street-level cop. . .
There was a death caused exactly by that dring my journey in the UK yesterday - coming off a motor way, someone was texting while waiting for the lights on the slip road and didn't notice the lights had gone green and all the cars had cleared in front of them, and they got rear ended.
Actually it does matter. I have had cars stall and fail when attempting to accelerate from a stop. Discovered the spark plugs got fouled because of a blocked EGR valve. The car ran fine until that moment.
It is 100% the responsibility of the driver who collided with the obstruction for colliding with a non-moving obstruction. The person sitting at a light could be cited for obstruction of traffic; however that does not move the blame for the collision onto him. A person sitting at a light being a dufus could easily be a disabled car, a cop car, a deer, a construction worker, a driver experiencing a heart attack, or any number of things that the next driver needs to remain aware of and react appropriately to.
Or are you the type that also blames gun manufacturers for murders?
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I'd bet that 90%+ of your statistic is 99.9% made up! You should probably work on being less jaded. I'd say a large majority of people are reasonable enough to only text at a red light and stay off their phones while driving. From my own car or from the sidewalk I still catch far more people talking with the phone up to their ear than I do catch people texting. Not being able to touch your Navigation for a couple seconds if its mounted to your windshield because its a 'phone' and not a separate $100+ device (that requires yearly subscriptions) is absolutely ridiculous, though.
Technically a 100% of the blame goes to the guy behind who did the rear-ending. I'd feel free to yell at the stationary driver, but it's not legal to just ram someone who doesn't accelerate fast enough for your liking.
Easy way to stop that problem. Don't do all of the "easy to enforce" things. Then they have nothing left but the drug dealers, rapists, murders, burglars, muggers, etc to catch.
No, it warrants better driver training. Right now we have air craft pilots train on simulators. We also have fire departments, police departments, military, oil rig crews, crane operators, semi truck drivers, network engineers, astronauts, first aid training, TSA personnel, Nuclear power plant personnel, train personnel, and a myriad of other jobs that all require a simulator for training. But for a standard drivers license you need to show you can drive around the block and memorize a test. We need to show that a person can handle an emergency while driving, not what its like on a sunny day at 35 miles an hour. We have had the technology for a low cost simulator at each dmv for a long time. States need to have them. Prove that a person can handle the most common accident situations safely and you will see the rates go down. Right now they are just not trained to see it happening and what to do when it happens.
There is no activity in a free society that is without risk. We could increase the size of our highway patrols 10 fold and we would not eliminate deaths on our roads.
The question is always one of acceptable risk vs costs. The opportunity cost of reducing highway fatalities by increasing police presence is a reduced presence in high-crime areas.
With a 1 in 100 chance that you will be injured in a car accident, driving is a risky activity. I argue that we as a society don't care that much about the risk - especially not enough to fund a massive increase in our police forces. Smoking kills far more people than car accidents, but I don't see much of a public push to rid the world of that habit. Why is that?
Simply, it is because we value our freedom over absolute security and we sure as hell do not want to pay for more police than is necessary to hold down violent crime.
I'd be willing to bet that people with sports cars often drive faster than the speed limit. We should just issue them speeding tickets when they are stopped at red lights to save some time and trouble.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
we've been handing out driver's licences like crackerjack toys for decades, so we've got complete and total morons behind the wheels of cars.
Sure, but if you're going to make it harder to get a license you also need to give people other options for getting around. I live in Vancouver. A few weeks ago I was talking to a woman from Omaha who had moved to suburban Vancouver and she was amazed that she didn't really need a car. She could do everything she needed to do on public transit, with the occasional taxi thrown into the mix. In Omaha that wasn't possible - You simply needed to have a car (or so she said). So if you're going to make it harder to get a license (and by extension take some people off the road) you need to concurrently fund public transit.
Technically a 100% of the blame goes to the guy behind who did the rear-ending
Why did you even use the word 'technically'? 100% of the blame rightly goes to the one doing the rear ending. If my car died while waiting at a red light someone doesn't have the right to kill me.
Even if you are doing something illegal, that doesn't shift blame for the actual accident. If I am listening to a pirated song on my MP3 player when someone rear ends me I don't share in blame for that either.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Seriously? As an honest reply to this (okay, I admit, I just got trolled) traffic cops are there for several reasons.
A) Revenue collection. I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that up front.
B) Keeping traffic close to speed limits. Yeah, the definition of "close" varies from cop to cop, and that makes it hard for a driver to drive with a lot of confidence of just how fast you can drive without getting a ticket. I hate that. I'd like an up front admission of "The speed limit is 70, but we won't ticket anyone doing under 82 unless they are otherwise driving unsafely". We'll never see that. Besides, "driving unsafely" is hard to define, but it's easy to give the guy changing lanes unsafely a speeding ticket, and it punishes unsafe behavior about as well (which means, not very) as a reckless driving ticket does, but it takes less to defend in court.
C) Being nearby when there is an accident. A nearby traffic cop is a first-responder for a traffic accident, and that job saves lives. They also do care-and-comfort during and after accidents. You look in any highway patrolman's trunk, and you'll find a teddy bear to be given to the little kid that survived a traffic accident (whose parent maybe didn't).
Most good traffic cops (and almost all Highway Patrol) regard speeding tickets as a way to get traffic to slow down so when there is an accident, there will be fewer deaths. In their job, it's always "when" and not "if" there is an accident. Energy is mass times velocity squared, remember.
Doing A lets the state pay for more cops to be around for C. Can't really tell you if I like that trade-off or not.
And yeah, none of this stops me from being pissed when I get a speeding ticket. Don't they have something better to do than bug me when I'm not hurting anyone?!?! ;)
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Georgia law(O.C.G.A., or Original Code of Georgia Annotated; O.C.G.A. 40-8-91 (a)) requires that law enforcement vehicles used to enforce traffic laws be marked with, at the very least, four inch block lettering on the driver and passenger side, indicating the agency that operates the vehicle, and lettering on the deck lid(trunk) indicating the same. All other law enforcement vehicles, namely "unmarked" vehicles, are prohibited from initiating traffic stops, save for true exigent circumstances. Sadly, there are a few states that allow or tolerate unmarked law enforcement vehicle enforcement traffic law.
Virginia was the worst, from what I witnessed on my trips between Georgia and Washington, D.C. There were many areas where multiple "unmarked"(no agency markings, or any markings, and no lights mounted outside of the vehicle) vehicles were lined up, waiting to initiate stops for what seemed like every 10 miles, or so. That is inviting major risk where it can be easily avoided.
I do have a serious problem with some of the actions of the officer discussed in the aforementioned article. O.C.G.A. 40-6-241.2 doesn't broadly cover "operating a motor vehicle", unlike other O.C.G.A. Title 40 laws do. If a driver is at a point of rest, even with a motor vehicle that has its motor in active operation and the vehicle's transmission is set in a gear that allows for forward or rearward locomotion, there is no legitimate reason to cite said driver for operating a mobile phone, or other device not exempted by 40-6-241.2("...citizens band radios, citizens band radio hybrids, commercial two-way radio communication devices, subscription based emergency communications, in-vehicle security, navigation devices, and remote diagnostics systems, or amateur or ham radio devices."). Once the vehicle is in motion, the driver would be in violation of O.C.G.A. 40-6-241.2(unless the driver is one of the "special people" exempted by that law.
I am an ex-law enforcement officer in the State of Georgia. I arrested more than a few people for DUI without the vehicle being in motion during any of the time I, or any other law enforcement officer observed the violation(most traffic violations have to be observed by a law enforcement officer in order to stop and/or cite for the offense). So, I understand the distinction between driving, in the practical sense, and the legal view of being in control of a motor vehicle. This law isn't as broad as the officer believes it to be.