Officer Ed Michael surprised several drivers Wednesday afternoon, walking up as they were stopped at the intersection of Mill Plain Boulevard and Southeast 190th Avenue, near Wal-Mart.
He couldn’t help but smile about it.
“They’ll drive right up next to me, and not even notice that I’m right there because they’re not paying attention,” he said, after asking one driver to pull into a nearby parking lot to have a chat with another officer.
Instead, they all were fiddling with their phones.
Michael, from the Battle Ground Police Department, and other officers from around the county contacted 203 drivers that afternoon as part of a statewide traffic enforcement emphasis to combat distracted driving, funded through the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.
Twelve drivers were ticketed. The fine for cellphone use while driving is $124. The other 191 left with warnings.
That day, two plainclothes officers hung out at different ends of Mill Plain, around Southeast 194th Avenue. They’d watch for drivers talking or texting, then radio what they saw to an officer down the street, who’d flag the drivers down at an intersection.
Vancouver, Battle Ground and Washougal police officers participated in Wednesday’s efforts, as well as the Washington State Patrol.
“Most people are OK with it,” said Vancouver Sgt. Therese Kubala. “We’ve had a couple people who are really upset by it, but we have to educate them and say, ‘You know, this is the law.’ ”
In general, she said, people seemed to appreciate the extra patrols, and understood why officers were out there.
It’s difficult to consistently assess whether a crashed driver was on the phone at the time, she said, but those numbers seem to be rising.
According to the state department of transportation, Washington saw more than 12,000 crashes last year connected to driver distraction, with 77 of them fatal. In 2010, distraction contributed to about 7,000 crashes, 15 of them fatal.
Part of the problem, Kubala said, is people tend to live in their own bubbles of experience, as opposed to cops like her, who see all the rear-end crashes, and worse, caused by not paying attention while behind the wheel.
A visit from a cop, she said, “just brings it to light: ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be messing with that phone.’ ”
She said officers on Wednesday stopped one driver who was texting on an iPad tablet he had sitting in his passenger seat.
Recently, a state senator told her about seeing, on the way to Olympia, a driver watching a video on a tablet resting on the steering wheel.
“We’ve got people doing some really strange things with those electronic devices,” Kubala said.
