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Police actions on the road sometimes dumbfounding
Dave Carter/Guelph Mercury
Officers who step out into live traffic to pull over a speeder not only risk their own lives but also the lives of everyone else on the road, writes Ian Law.
It’s not too often you see our police doing something unthinkably unsafe or completely crazy, but on March 6th what I witnessed was totally thoughtless.
I was driving into Toronto from north of Scarborough down the York/Durham line. I turned west onto Steeles Ave. E. and into the glare of the setting sun. I had my sunglasses at the ready, but even with them on, my vision was compromised as the sun was quite close to the horizon and right down the road.
This section of Steeles Ave. is notorious for radar traps located on the north side or Steeles to catch westbound speeders as they traverse from Pickering into the City of Toronto where the speed limit drops to 60 km/h.
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What happened next left me completely perplexed.
Naturally I was driving in the right lane when an SUV blew by me in the left lane. No big deal about that except as it started to disappear into the setting sun, I could just barely make out what looked like a pedestrian crossing in front of this speeding SUV.
Alas, as I slowed to compensate for the lack of vision and the strange events unfolding in front of me, I realized there was a police officer standing on the road facing these blinded drivers trying to wave over the speeding SUV. He was in a live lane, standing there as if invincible and directing a sun dazed driver travelling above the speed limit to pull over in front of me toward the shoulder of the road.
The officer was not wearing a safety vest of reflective material, which in those lighting conditions would not have mattered anyway. He was barely visible through the blinding sunlight.
This was not only dangerous to the officer but also dangerous to the SUV driver and myself since neither of us could make out exactly what the heck was happening on the road.
Was it worth the officers’ life and limb to stop that speeding SUV? Was there a quota the officer just had to make for that day that he would stay at that radar post until the wee hours of twilight?
Why didn’t the officer simply follow the SUV in his cruiser and pull the driver over in a safe place? It would have saved him from walking out into traffic.
This is not the first time I have seen police officers putting their lives in jeopardy to stop speeders. I wrote in Wheels back in 2004 about another dangerous situation on Hwy. 115 where the OPP officers set up a radar trap on the left shoulder of the highway over a hill. They would step out into a live lane of traffic to try to stop speeders doing 130 km/h. Unfortunately it took a collision caused by this action to get the police to rethink their unsafe strategy.
Sometimes it is not worth an unsafe stop to try to catch a speeder. Some thought as to the officer’s safety as well as that of the surrounding traffic needs to be considered before such bizarre acts take place. Some police activity must fall under the Occupational Health & Safety Act, right? There isn’t another vocation that would let a worker walk out into live traffic in those conditions.
If I or another citizen were to stand out in a live lane and wave at traffic in that scenario, we would be carted away for a mental assessment.
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