Texting while driving: the latest from Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad and Dearborn Fire Chief Joseph Murray


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It is a problem, a HUGE problem! Texting while driving is getting worse and according to the National Safety Council cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. Texting while driving is 6x more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk. On the positive side, our society is aware and 94% of drivers support a ban on texting while driving. We spoke with Dearborn’s two leading public safety officers about the issue…

By Stephen Coats and Rasheed AlNozili
The Yemeni American News

 

Ron Haddad, Dearborn Police Chief

Ron Haddad, Dearborn Police Chief said, “Texting and driving continues to be a major contribution to accidents in our city, over 40% of all accidents are rear end collisions which means people are not paying attention and following too close. Our critical accidents are up 12% year-to-date and our arrests of people that are driving carelessly out there continue to escalate.”
According to Dearborn Fire Chief Joseph Murray, “I tell people all the time, driving is one of the most dangerous parts of our jobs as firefighters it’s always in the top three reasons why firefighters are killed every year is through some type of traffic incident. So for us it’s a real big issue.”
He adds “people are not keeping as much focus as they should be on the road and getting distracted and for us that’s problematic because then every day when we’re driving we have our sirens on, we have our lights on, everything’s going like we are supposed to have and people are still not seeing us because they’re looking down at their phone or they’re not hearing us because the radios too loud. I’ve even seen people watching videos on their phone while they’re driving. And that is just not a safe situation.”
When Chief Haddad was asked on what the community can do about this very important issue, he said “especially with parents that give young people vehicles to drive I would recommend that parents really go over the rules with their young people and not provide them with phones and tell him to stay off their phones and off their text messaging while driving. I think that’s so important that parents take an active role in letting their kids know.”

Joseph Murray, Dearborn Fire Chief

Fire Chief Murray tells us with respect to firemen and firewomen seeing this on the road “a lot of times we’ll be driving up and expecting a person to pull over to the right and they don’t do it because they’re distracted and that puts us in a dangerous situation and it also puts the other people driving on the street in a danger situation because what typically happens is someone’s texting and all of a sudden they realize there’s an emergency vehicle behind them and they freak out and they just pull the car to one side or the other real rapidly not really paying attention.”
He then says “if we’re driving up to someone who’s distracted and not being able to move to the side of the road for us, it delays our response. We have to slow down, provide a safe distance and wait for that person to move over in a safe manner. If they’re not moving in a safe manner we will move ourselves to try to go around them but that also increases the danger to our responders and the people on the road so we try not to go in the wrong lane if we can avoid it but sometimes people are so distracted we have to do it just to be able to get to people.”
The Yemeni American News staff asked if there are cameras discovering texting and driving. Chief Haddad responded “We have several intersections that are wired up with cameras but it’s not an efficient way to know whether somebody is texting and driving. I can tell you that you can pull up to any stop sign or any traffic signal you can look in the car next to you and they got their heads down texting. It’s really an addiction of our current society and I think that the more we do that the more you are going to have people injured and so we have to work on it from a holistic point of view. Everyone has to be giving out the same message and it’s more than a slogan, don’t text and drive!”
When asked about how the Fire and Police Department are welcoming new immigrants and informing them of the city’s regulations, Chief Murray said “My first recommendation is to not be texting at all when you’re driving. Get a hands free device if anything. It delays the ambulance to treat somebody because we can’t get there as fast. Don’t text don’t watch videos.”
He mentioned that cars today are built to be quiet; and they’re built to be soundproof. He adds that when people have their radios loud and the windows are closed a lot of times it kind of muffles their sirens.
Chief Murray ends his answer with “People have to be extra vigilant on what’s going on around them. Checking their mirrors and understanding what’s going on in the roadway and not looking at their phones.”

 
  
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