Challenges of enforcing cellphone use while driving laws among police in the USA: a cross-sectional analysis

Abstract

ObjectivesResearch suggests that cellphone use while driving laws may be difficult for police to enforce in the USA, but this is unknown. A national survey of police officers was conducted to determine whether barriers to enforcing these laws exist, what aspects of laws make them easier to enforce and ways to discourage the behaviour among drivers.DesignCross-sectional survey.SettingUSA.ParticipantsIndividuals >18 years of age employed as a law enforcement officer from all 50 states were recruited via convenience sampling through multiple modalities from November 2019 to April 2020. Officers (N=353) from 31 states participated.Primary and secondary outcome measuresDescriptive statistics and multi-level logistic regression analyses were run to assess the responses.ResultsThe most common barriers to enforcing texting bans (ie, the most prevalent law) were drivers concealing their phone use (78%) and the officer not being able to determine what the driver was doing on their phone (65%). If a universal hand-held cellphone ban was in effect in their state, officers were 77% less likely (adjusted OR=0.23; 95% CI 0.08 to 0.70) to report that a texting ban was difficult to adjudicate. The majority of officers (86%) agreed that having one general law that prohibits any type of hand-held cellphone use would aid with enforcement, and that laws must be a primary offence (87%), and be applicable to all licensed drivers (91%). Most officers felt that driver education is needed.ConclusionsWhile numerous barriers to enforcement were identified, opportunities exist to improve current legislation to aid enforcement efforts and to prevent the behaviour among drivers.

Barriers to Enforcing Laws and Support for Restricting Cell Phone Use While Driving among Law Enforcement Officers

“…Similar investigations conducted in other states would be beneficial to understanding the attitudes of traffic enforcement officers outside of Ohio and the effects of variation in laws across jurisdictions on beliefs about the risks and prevalence of CUWD. Unlike previous research (19)(20)(21), Ohio officers did not identify the most frequent barrier as being the difficulty of identifying distracted drivers or proving driver distraction. It could be that a more explicit item (e.g., ''Drivers concealing cell phone use'') would have increased the number of officers reporting this as a barrier, or perhaps Ohio drivers did not bother concealing distraction because of permissive laws-officers estimated that Ohio drivers are quite distracted (Appendix A).…”

“…To encourage participation, we did not assess demographics because these would constitute identifying information for officers from small departments (i.e., female officers or those who are members of racial minority groups). In previous research, demographic variables were not associated with officer attitudes or perceived barriers ( 21 ) and, thus, would not have provided much useful information in this case, but could have discouraged participation.…”

“…Although our sample is larger than other surveys of officers' opinions on CUWD (18,21), our results are similarly limited by the use of convenience samples. Although most of the Ohio State Highway Patrol participated, and most County Sheriff's departments were represented (Appendix A), our sample of police officers may not represent all police departments, particularly smaller departments in rural areas.…”

“…However, few studies have been conducted with respect to enforcement of restrictions concerning distracted driving. Studies have been qualitative ( 19 , 20 ) or involved only a relatively small number of officers ( 18 , 21 ). Building on this previous research, we recruited a large sample of Ohio law enforcement officers.…”

Potential of Bluetooth Wireless Technology as a Tool for Agricultural Extension

“…Though BWT has been used in other fields to improve visually impaired drivers' safety and access to information (Bohonos, Lee, Malik, Thai, & Manduchi, 2008;Rudisill & Zhu, 2021), it has had minimal applications in agriculture. BWT has been used to transfer data on farmers' cellphones for record keeping when selling their products and for improving the performance of low-power embedded sensors (Balmos, Layton, Ault, Krogmeier, & Buckmaster, 2013;Sen et al, 2009).…”