Texting, driving bill all but lost

Plan to crack down stalls in Senate amid concerns over privacy, profiling

TALLAHASSEE — This was supposed to be the year the Florida Legislature got tougher on texting while driving. Instead, the idea appears to be dead.

The legislation has stalled in the Senate and will not be heard in its final committee. Its chair, state Sen. Rob Bradley, R-Fleming Island, cites worries about police invading drivers’ privacy and minorities being treated unfairly.

The decision comes despite support in the House. House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’Lakes, had announced support for the bill, which would make texting and driving a “primary offense,” allowing police to stop a driver immediately after seeing the person texting. Currently, officers need another reason to stop the car first.

The House on Thursday passed a texting bill by a vote of 112-2, a month after a South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation revealed that crashes typical of texting and driving increased at a staggering rate between 2013 and 2016.

The total number of accidents increased by 11 percent in Florida during those years, but crashes caused by careless driving rose by as much as four times that amount, the

Sun Sentinel found.

According to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, about 660,000 drivers use electronic devices on America’s roads on any given day. That led to 391,000 people injured in distracted-driving accidents in 2015 and 3,477 killed. Yet Florida’s texting laws remain among the weakest in the country.

Most states already make texting a primary offense. Only six states have laws as lax as Florida’s: Arizona, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota. “It was very disappointing over the years to see how people didn’t think it was a serious thing,” said Delpha Samuels, who lost her brother, E’arron Haley, to a texting driver.

E’arron had been shooting an inline skating video at C.B. Smith Park when a texting driver killed him at the entrance to the park. He was 12 years old.

July 2 will mark a decade since the accident, but Samuels still hurts.

“I really hope they will come to an agreement, whatever needs to be done, and it will be made a primary offense, because it’s about time Florida does it,” she said.

The current law passed in 2013. Every year since then, lawmakers have tried to make texting a primary offense. Never have they come as close as this year.

Samuels called the House vote a “victory coming to pass for us finally.”

But that victory might be short-lived. Bradley, the Senate Appropriations chair, said Thursday that his committee won’t hear the bill. Several black Democratic lawmakers have also worried about racial profiling. They cite an ACLU report showing that after Florida passed a mandatory seat belt law, black motorists were pulled over two to four times more often than white drivers.

To quell those concerns, the bill has been updated so that police would have to inform anyone pulled over for texting while driving that they can refuse police requests to search a phone. Police would then have to obtain a warrant.

Additionally, police would have to note the ethnicity of drivers they cite for texting, so statistics can be gathered to show whether racial profiling is occurring.

“At the end of the day, the people that are texting and driving, it’s very clear and very obvious — they’re looking down and not paying attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, it matters that you’re texting while driving,” said Samuels, who is black. “It’s sad that a lot of people are hiding behind the race thing.”

The House bill is sponsored by state Rep. Jackie Toledo, R-Tampa, and state Rep. Emily Slosberg, DBoca Raton. Slosberg’s twin sister, Dori, died in a car crash in 1996. So, like her father, former state Rep. Irv Slosberg, Emily has made road safety her primary mission in public life.

“We have eight days left,” Slosberg said of the legislative session, which ends March 9. “Rep. Toledo and I are not going to quit. We hope the Senate will follow the House’s lead.”

It’s still possible the bill could be added in its entirety to another bill as an amendment, or in some other way be brought to the Senate floor, but such maneuvers are rarely done.