Marylee Shrider: If officers are on cell phones, it's because they need to be
| Friday, Aug 22 2008 07:10 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 06:06 PM
A friend was sitting at a red light the other day, chatting on her cell phone, when she glanced up to lock eyes with a police officer in the next lane.
Eyebrows raised in warning, the officer motioned for her to hang up the phone, which she did. Apparently satisfied, the officer then turned his attention back to the conversation he was having on his cell phone.
The incident led my friend to ask the question a lot of folks have posed since California’s new hands-free phone law kicked in July 1.
“Why does he get to talk on his cell phone when it’s illegal for me to talk on mine?”
Because you don’t drive a police car, that’s why.
According to the new law, police officers and other “operators of emergency vehicles” may chat with impunity because they are exempt.
But there are limits.
“Our policy is that officers will comply with the law, absent an emergency circumstance,” says Sgt. Greg Terry, Bakersfield Police Department spokesman. “Then you have to consider what constitutes an emergency, which isn’t always red lights and sirens.”
BPD officers often use their cell phones to call “reporting parties to obtain information as they’re responding to a call,” Terry says.
“Depending on the nature of the call, that information can be helpful to them in coordinating their response.” (Really, that’s how he talks.)
Officers also use their cell phones in lieu of car radios when trying to sneak up on bad guys — who are as able as anyone to own police scanners — or to avoid us nosy media types.
Most agencies have similar policies, so when we civilians spot a police officer on his cell phone, perhaps we shouldn’t just assume he’s chatting up his girlfriend (a compelling, but impossible-to-prove suspicion), especially since officers have been pretty busy lately.
Bakersfield police wrote just under 300 citations in July for cell-phone law violations that don’t include text-messaging, which, unbelievably, adults may still legally do while driving. Seems that lawmakers somehow forgot to include the technology in the cell-phone law, but this week sent a bill banning behind-the-wheel texting to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk.
According to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, the cell-phone ban is supposed to save some 300 lives a year, though blabbing on cell phones hasn’t proven to be any more distracting than, say, snacking, applying lipstick or driving around with a van full of squirming soccer players.
But somebody has to take the kids to soccer and Lord knows we’re not about to give up our French fries. And the cell phone is a high-profile frustration, especially for drivers nearly killed by yakking dimwits afflicted with what the National Safety Council calls “inattention blindness.”
So turn off the phone, buy a Bluetooth or pay a $20 fine, it’s your choice.
And don’t worry so much about who the police and firefighters are talking to. It could be you.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Marylee Shrider, not The Californian. Reach her at mshrider@bakersfield.comor 395-7474.
