We all occasionally look at our phones while driving. Don’t even think about saying you’ve never done it. We all have, whether we change the song, answer a quick text, or daringly scrolling through social media.
Well, put your phones away because our governor Charlie Baker has had enough with the excessive cell phone usage by drivers!
A law has recently passed that gives police officers the right to pull you over if they suspect you are using your phone while driving. Perhaps a notification pops up, and a police officer sees that little bit of gleaming light coming through your car, they have a right to pull you over and even issue you a fine.
Violators of this new law can be fined $100 for their first offense, $250 for the second offense, and a whopping $500 for any additional crimes beginning March 31st.
Why?
Gov. Charlie Baker, when asked about the new legislation, had this to say, “When a driver on an electronic device hits something or someone, that’s not an accident. It’s a crash that was avoidable…to prevent further injuries and horrible tragedies”.
Now, if you ask me why here’s my take on it…
It seems as if we are trying to “kill two birds with one stone” perhaps, because not only is this legislation meant to cut down the tragic accidents that can occur, it also is an attempt to monitor the demographics of who cops tend to pull over because now when a cop pulls you over related to this law, they have to report your age, race, and gender. If there happens to be a trend in potential racial profiling or even gender profiling, the individual department will be forced to undergo bias training.
So what is this law trying to solve? It seems to me like they are trying to make it look like they are doing something to prevent racial profiling allegations, or as a precaution for the future, make it seem like each department isn’t targeting one race.
Here’s where they failed, however. If they wanted to correctly monitor if any racial or gender profiling is happening, it should be required that ALL traffic stops report the data of age, race, and gender to get an accurate percentage and trend. Just collecting this data on Hands-Free Law violation stops has nothing to do with anything, and doesn’t result in an objective and representative collection of data.
I guess I support the bill if it’s sole purpose was to cut down the number of accidents that happen every year due to distracted driving. But it only took me one Google search to find out that there’s much more underneath the surface.