Comment on Police crackdown on distracted driving nets 75 drivers Wednesday

Reprising the semi-disguise he wore a year ago while kicking off a four-week distracted driver crackdown, Stamford police Sgt. Andrew Gallagher helped ticket 75 drivers Wednesday simply by standing next to a pickup truck looking vaguely like a highway worker while spotting offending drivers. For three and one-half hours Wednesday morning Gallagher, in his floppy-brimmed surveyors hat and orange T-shirt, leaned against a yellow ladder propped up on the tailgate of a white pickup truck, radioed descriptions of cars to nearby officers waiting to pull drivers over. All told, the officers wrote up 56 tickets for cell phone use, 18 for texting while driving, 11 red light violations for people running the light at the bottom of southbound Exit 8 at Elm Street, three driving without license tickets and one man, who was texting someone, for driving an unregistered vehicle. At the kick-off of last year's texting while driving blitz Gallagher, posing again as a highway worker near the foot of Exit 8, issued 43 $150 tickets for hand-held electronics violations, 10 stoplight tickets and two tickets for seat belt violations at the accident-prone intersection in the space. Later Wednesday, Gallagher, who heads up the police department's Traffic Enforcement Unit said he was not encouraged that it is still so easy to catch people misusing their phones while driving. The effort is part of a larger campaign sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which promotes April as national distracted driving awareness month.