A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.
Automated camera companies market their devices as automated license plate readers — tools for catching stolen cars, flagging warrants, and aiding serious investigations.
Sold as a Crime Tool. Used as a Fine Machine.
It depends a lot on what the law says I’d say. Just like having an open container of alcohol in your car is illegal in many places, it’s not a bad thing per se if having a phone on one’s lap is treated the same way as if it’s being used.
Unlike what the article says, phone use in a car is not seen as a minor traffic violation in many places. In the US literally hundreds of people die each year due to phone use while driving specifically.
I’ll tell you what I told the other guy because you clearly didn’t read the article carefully, as is obvious from your comment.
Actually, I’ll word it a bit differently: based on the description of the image, show me beyond a reasonable doubt that there was ongoing “phone use”, as you just claimed. Those are your words, its what you just claimed, so you should have absolutely no issue explaining to me. Right?
Well, that is unless you go back and reread the article and realize that you won’t be able to. Not in a reasonable, legally sound manner anyway.
I’ve read the article already and I’m well aware. And like I said, it depends on what the law says on phone use. It’s not as simple as ‘oh she wasn’t holding her phone so she wasn’t using it’. It depends on case law, how phone use is defined and whether the law is using a kind of prophylactic rule.
You can get fined for texting and driving while you’re standing still. It’s not something that you’d be able to say makes sense based on an article like this, but looking at case law and how the law was written, it does make sense.
Personally I think it makes a lot of sense to have prophylactic rules in place for what constitutes phone use. There is generally no reason why a phone should be laying in one’s lap while driving except to be used illegally whilst driving, so such a rule could help enforcement and save lives.