News
Catching Distracted (and Just Bad) Drivers: Sitting Shotgun with New Canaan Police
|
New Canaan Police Officer Tom Callinan steered an unmarked Chevy Tahoe off of Farm Road and into the South School lot on a recent weekday morning, circled and swung back around, parking the SUV so that he could see clear across the intersection, the access road into New Canaan High School and Waveny beyond spread out before him. “We’ll set up right here,” said Callinan, sworn in last June. “We can see people coming both ways.”
Not long after—at exactly 11:58 a.m.—a black Jeep Laredo 4×4 brazenly ran the stop sign (“He didn’t even pump the brakes”) and swung left into the NCHS lot, prompting Callinan to pull forward and pull over the 17-year-old motorist. This time, the teen—whom Callinan said was “extremely respectful” and apologized straightaway for the moving violation—received a written warning that will go into his driving record in case it happens again. During the same late-morning enforcement shift, Callinan from the same vantage point pulled over a woman traveling along Farm who had dropped her hand the moment she spotted him watching (“She just dropped her phone,” he said as he pulled out and hit the flashers)—another day in the life of a New Canaan police officer addressing what the department’s chief has called “a new traffic safety epidemic” in town: distracted driving.