As Troopers Crack Down, Their Message to Drivers: Put Down the Phone

MONROE, N.Y. — Along a stretch of highway in Orange County, a target suddenly appeared: a cherry red garbage truck and, behind the wheel, the driver, piloting it one-handedly, chatting away on his phone.

“Now that’s bad,” state Trooper Jason J. Lewis said Friday morning as he spun his unmarked SUV around across the double yellow line of State Road 17 M in the village of Monroe to pursue the hulking truck.

Across New York state, law enforcement agencies are in the middle of a five-day crackdown on drivers who use phones and other electronic devices while their vehicles are moving, often at high speeds.

While tickets from the State Police for talking on a phone have been falling, tickets for texting rose by 20 percent in 2017, to more than 110,000.

As Lewis patrolled the roads of Orange County, from Kiryas Joel to Wallkill, he had no trouble finding people talking or texting.

Among those he cited Friday morning were a nurse chit-chatting with her sister, a retired New York City police officer scrolling through his phone while turning across four lanes, and a plumber speaking to a client while zipping along a highway off-ramp. Once stopped, most expressed chagrin about their behavior, and frustration about the all-consuming allure of the phone.

“You do it without even thinking about it,” the driver of the garbage truck, Jose Perez, 62, said as Lewis wrote his ticket. “You know the outcome, you know an accident could happen. I don’t even know why I did it.”

In a study of 2015 data, the state’s Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research found that 160 people were killed and more than 33,000 injured in crashes in which a driver’s inattention was a factor. Nationwide, in 2016, nearly 3,500 people were killed in such crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“It upsets me. It bothers me,” said Lewis, who lives in Goshen, in Orange County, and is assigned to Troop F of the State Police. “If an individual drives by and somebody is on the phone or looking down at their phone, it would put my children’s life in jeopardy.”

The violation carries a fine of up to $250, and Lewis accompanied every ticket he issued Friday with a stern roadside lecture on the risks. “I hope that I’m teaching them,” he said. “Distracted driving will either kill yourself, or you’re going to kill others.”

Sasha Acosta, 26, said she knew the risks and feared for the safety of her 2-year-old child. That’s why she activated a feature on her phone that turns off rings and pings when it senses she is driving. But on Friday, as she turned into the medical clinic where she works in Kiryas Joel, it didn’t stop her from fiddling with a music video on YouTube. She was listening to it when Lewis caught her. “I’m a mom, I know better,” she said, shaking her head.

Some people pleaded innocence; one woman told the trooper he was mistaken, until he told her the color, make and model of the phone he had seen her using as she drove by. Others said they unwittingly succumbed to the siren song of their phone. Robert Rivera, a retired New York police officer, scrolled through his phone as he turned across several lanes in Wallkill. “You don’t realize you’re doing it,” he said, explaining that he had been trying to make a doctor’s appointment as he drove his Chevy Suburban, barely looking up from his phone.

In the youth Bible class she teaches at church, Shelli Joyner, 50, a nurse, warns her students about the risks of distracted driving. More than 30 percent of fatalities ascribed to distracted driving in 2015 were drivers under 29, according to the federal safety administration. And as a registered nurse, she said, she has tended to victims of such crashes. But on Friday morning she was conversing with her sister on speakerphone while holding the phone up to her mouth, as she drove her Cadillac SUV down Academy Avenue in Middletown.

“I am a nurse. I know how very dangerous this is. I instill this in my children, and of course I fall victim to it,” Joyner said. “We all know it’s wrong.”

She would be taking the lesson, and the citation, to her youth group that evening, she said. “I want them to know they’re serious about this,” she said. “Thank God I didn’t get into an accident.”

Lewis wrote out the citation. As he got back in his car, Joyner said the lesson hit home. “Five points on my license!” she screamed.