Last week, the NYPD held their third Cell Phone Crackdown day of the year.
During the one-day crackdown, the boys in blue wrote 7,529 tickets to motorists who dared chat on their cell phone while driving or even glance at their iPod while at a red light. Typically they issue about 540 tickets a day for using a cell phone or electronic gadget while driving.
With fines that run $120 for motorists and $200 for cabbies, the ticketing spree probably brought in between $900k and $1.5 million.
Assuming the average traffic cop can write two tickets an hour when their huffing it, the NYPD devoted some 3,764 man-hours to the crackdown. That is the equivalent of 470 officers spending an entire 8-hour day doing nothing but ticketing chatty drivers.
Things must be going pretty well when the police can devote that kind of man power to stomping out such a fake public threat—that or the NYPD Traffic Division is massively overstaffed. Either way, the Detroit Police Department—where the typical 9-1-1 response time is over 20 minutes—must be envious.
Previous topics mentioned in this post:
Drivers understand that cell phones just aren’t that dangerous
The graph the New York Times doesn’t want you to see
