Police Distracted Driving and the Arlington Mayor's Denial

Last night, NBC 5 here in DFW ran a story on so called "distracted driving" and the Arlington Police Department.  Check out that story here.  After watching the story, I chose to give Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck the benefit of the doubt.  By that, I mean the story made clear that he either a) doesn't have a clue what's going on in the Arlington Police Department; b) is a fool who believes anything he is told; or c) is an absolute liar.  I chose to give the benefit of the doubt and believe that he is out of the loop and unaware of all things that occur in the department.

I say these things not because I have any ill will toward the man-- I don't have any problem with the mayor personally.  But his statements that Arlington Police Department are better trained, above all others, and that officers playing with their computers causing accidents may be a problem in other cities, but not Arlington, is absurd.  Arlington PD is not above and beyond all other departments in the area, and comes complete with its own share of problems.  Mayor Cluck is demonstrating what could easily become a top down failure to accept responsibility for failure and error.

The investigation done by Scott Friedman, @NBCDFWScott, began over the summer, but the Arlington police chief refused to speak with him at that time, so he got Cluck.  Cluck claimed that Arlington PD was above the fray and they had only 3 accidents over 2-3 years related to the use of in car computers while driving.  An open records request revealed that, if you believe Cluck, the PD gave him the wrong number, and they in fact had 18 such accidents over 3 years, all of which they described as minor.  My suggestion, however, is that the word "minor" is word play used by the city to downplay the reality of what these folks did.  The videos obtained by the news station show some nicely damaged police cars and officers driving into on coming traffic, causing minor injuries, running through dead end road barricades, and hitting cars with kids on board.  Not really anything minor about it, even if your define a minor accident as one without injury or transport to a hospital.

The most interesting thing to come out of this story is the hypocrisy of it all.  Arlington, as NBC notes, is one of the strongest in the state for anti-cell phone use while driving.  They fight about citizens emailing or texting while driving, but Cluck is more than okay with his officers flying around town playing on the computer and causing accidents.  It's ludicrous.  BTW, this is not a new concept to me.  Having worked in a police dispatch office long before law school, I can tell you that this problem is one that has been ongoing since at least the time of the small Mobile Data Terminals, or MDT's, that had the little screens and did little more than give an officer an address of a call and a few characters of what was going happening.

Cluck implies that Arlington Police can do this because, unlike the general public, they are "trained" to do this.  We know now that at least an average of 6 times a year, those well trained officers put the public's lives in danger, not because of a pursuit or because of urgent police business, but because they like to type and drive.  This is the double standard the public finds hard to swallow when cities like Arlington want to force new, money making ordinances and violations into place, and this lack of accountability is why many people just do not trust the police.