Image via WXYZ-TV Detroit/YouTube
Police in Dearborn, Michigan have been doing distracted driving blitzes, something which is done in other cities across the country. However, it’s the tactic of using plainclothes officers standing on sidewalks to bust people fiddling on their phone or whatever else they’re up to instead of driving which has people all riled up.
Watch a distracted semi driver cause a huge accident.
Some residents of Dearborn have taken to social media to voice their rather interesting takes on this tactic. At least one person said the practice is “entrapment” although we’re not sure that individual knows what entrapment actually is.
Anytime police use plainclothes officers or unmarked units, the people who end up getting busted complain. After all, they find it rather unfair that cops did “sneaky” things to catch them in the act of doing something they shouldn’t be doing anyway.
Considering what a problem distracted driving is, the rather emboldened responses from people who were busted for engaging in it tells you something about why the problem is so pervasive in the first place. They seem to feel little if any remorse for paying attention to their phone instead of the road.
A lieutenant with Dearborn Police explained in an interview with WXYZ-TV that the plainclothes distracted driving program was developed after quite a few community members complained about distracted drivers.
It’s almost like distracted drivers are entitled and don’t understand that everyone else is tired of their dangerous habits. Therein lies part of the problem: whenever distracted drives are called out for their behavior, they immediately go on the attack and claim others, including the police, are the ones at fault.
What’s funny is the program doesn’t focus on writing citations but instead on educating drivers. We could understand the complaints if police were just handing out tickets like crazy, but they claim that isn’t happening.
Image via WXYZ-TV Detroit/YouTube
