Beeps, Waves and Tickets: Ossining Cops Conduct Enforcement, Experiment

OSSINING, NY — Ossining police wrote 70 tickets to folks who were texting and driving through the intersection of Croton Avenue and Route 9 on Tuesday morning.

It's not as if they didn't warn them. A post went up on the department's Facebook page early in the morning, explaining what was going down.

Police Chief Kevin Sylvester said Wednesday that they decided on the Facebook video because "ultimately your job is to change the behavior, not write the ticket."

And that intersection, known in the department as Hubble's Corner, after the hardware store (now the Midas Building) that used to be there, bigger, when the intersection was smaller, gets a lot of traffic. Not just cars, but pedestrians going to work, to the bank, to the library, to the community center, to the municipal building.

With so many lanes, so many turn signals and so much foot and vehicle traffic, distraction is a real problem even if you're going slow, he pointed out.

By 11 a.m., it was clear that lots of people had read the Facebook post (or even Patch's article about it), Sylvester said, because the officers were reporting lots of beeps and waves. By the end of the day, they had written about 70 tickets without impeding traffic.

Police experts say that texting and driving is even more dangerous than drunk driving, and we all know how dangerous that is. And cell phone driver distraction goes far beyond texting, Sylvester says — drivers were seen watching YouTube and reading Facebook.

Sylvester got the idea for the social media shout-out from a police department in South Carolina, whose chief tweets the location of its speed trap detail. Again, it's about preventing accidents.

Image from Ossining Police Department on its new Instagram account