Welcome to D.C. Now Go Home
This morning's Examiner reports that the city failed to give fair warning to 20,000 motorists fined $100 each for mashing cell phones to their ears while driving.
The city did a poor job informing the drivers (many who come from the suburbs where the action is only bad form) that it's banned in the District, the paper learned from a Police Complaints Board report released Thursday.
Well "boo f'in hoo," as my colleague might put it.
Ignorance of a law is generally not a valid excuse for breaking it, the Examiner reporter writes in the second paragraph, and he is correct.
And law aside, only a driver from some Virginia dark holler (where even Verizon reception is spotty) could have missed the notion that driving one handed with a phone in your ear is felony bad judgment.
Perhaps at District borders we should install signs as Virginia does to advertise its radar detector law.
"Welcome to the District of Columbia," the signs would read. "Leave your guns at home. If you're going to smoke, step outside the bar. If you chat while driving, buy the dorky earpiece. Consider yourself warned."
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1:14 pm
Wonder how many of the folks who were busted are professional driver - cabbies, limo drivers, truck drivers? They have no excuse. As for the tired pretext that the offenders saw cops do it so it must be okay, I suppose we can all do 90 mph down city streets, run red lights, too.
3:39 pm
So, then, you think its OK for cops to blatantly break laws as they do on a regular basis, e.g. running lights and speeding without their lights on, and yapping on the cell phones all the time?
There was a time when one actually respected the police as giving a crap about the laws they so vigorously uphold. I guess I have a hard time understanding why it's safe for a cop to talk on his phone while driving, but it's not safe for me to do so.
So, yes, I do think it's OK for me to do the same things the cops do, and I will continue to follow their fine example however they choose to present it. I can assure you I'm a better driver than most DC cops, too.
5:05 pm
Wait a minute, they actually enforce that law?!? It doesn't seem to to deter the dozens of people I observe yapping away on their cellphones every day.
2:07 am
Uh, Jamie: Cops get trained to go places in a hurry. They get paid to as well. Why all the hurry? Oh, right, someone else needs help, not Jamie.
8:01 am
The cellphone talkers have something of a point; We don't exactly have a 0-tolerance situation on this. Judging by the number of mashed-ear-drives I see each day, those 20,000 infractions probably represent less than 1% of all instances, so we are pretty damn close to a 0-enforcement situation.
I'm just saying... really, I live in DC, and have never actually seen this law enforced. And DC has tons of laws like that. Priorities, you know.