WETHERSFIELD - Better not text and drive--at least not at any point between Sept. 3 and 24, anyway.
The Wethersfield Police Department will be able to dedicate road patrol teams to enforcing the state’s texting while driving ban during that period, courtesy of a state Department of Transportation grant. The Town Council approved the Police Department’s acceptance of the grant at its Aug. 18 meeting.
â€"It’s gone the way of seatbelts and drunk driving in that the state has put out a grant,†said Wethersfield Police Chief James Cetran in comments made to the Council before the vote was taken. â€"Of course distracted driving is very dangerous, so we want to jump on that.â€
How dangerous?
In 2011, there were 3,331 fatalities from â€"distracted drivingâ€, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). â€"Distracted driving†is a vague term, but the increase-from 3,267 the year before-occurred during a year in which 196 billion text messages were sent or received. That’s a 50 percent increase in text messaging from 2009.
Eighteen percent of motor vehicle crashes in 2011 involved a distracted driver, according to the CDC.
â€"It’s tough for an officer to handle that [enforcing the ban on texting while driving] because if you see it, you don’t want to make a dangerous situation more dangerous by chasing them down in traffic,†Cetran said.
So in Wethersfield, distracted driving related tickets don’t top the list of offenses the Police Department catches, he said.
â€"It’s not a real significant number,†Cetran said. â€"Speeders are probably higher. It’s [distracted driving] harder to enforce. Speeding is probably easier with radars, but officers would be dedicated to this [distracted driving] so it should bring in more.â€
Cetran envisions deploying one to two teams of two officers. One officer on each team acts as a spotter while the other pulls over the offending motorist. The grant money covers the cost of paying them overtime.
Teams will be on duty for shifts that range from a minimum of four hours to eight hours, and can be deployed at any point seven days a week.
The maximum grant amount a town can get is $15,000. Wethersfield will be getting $13,500, and the state DOT will match 25 percent of what a police department actually uses.