Rubberneck at your peril
You see things when you’re a first responder that you can’t unsee.
There are people who die in tragic and preventable ways, lying like ragdolls wherever they’ve fallen. Young people whose lives are tragically short. Injuries so graphic that they swim back into your head when you’re doing other things: raking leaves, washing dishes, sitting on the couch with a book.
The most disturbing, I can tell you from experience, are the near-impossibilities, the ones your mind has a hard time making sense out of.
Your head doesn’t want to believe that a person can be in one part of the room, while one or more of their fingers can be somewhere else. How the top half of a person can be pristine, the bottom half crushed. Those kinds of images can stay with you for years, as if they make no more sense now than they did five or 10 years ago. Your mind works over the situation, as if considering it often enough will make it eventually make sense.
Get a few first responders together, and their back-andforth about the strangest things they’ve seen might horrify you, how lightly they seem to be taking it. It’s a coping mechanism, and it’s one they need.
But this isn’t really about detached fingers or what pavement does to motorcyclists.
This is a different kind of observation, one that’s troubling emergency services more and more as they try to do their jobs.
Anyone who has worked an accident scene has had to deal with rubberneckers, and the way those rubberneckers sometimes cause a whole new round of damage and injury. Sometimes, it’s as simple as someone piling into the back of the car in front of them because they were looking at an accident, instead of watching where they were going.
More and more, though, the issue is one of people trying to drive while photographing or videoing accident scenes with their smartphones.
This new kind of distracted driver endangers themselves, other drivers and emergency workers. Police forces and fire departments have plenty of examples of camera-holding drivers nearly hitting emergency workers or driving themselves right off the road.
Where do those pictures and videos end up? Often, as quickly as possible, shared on social media as Facebook posts or Tweets.
And what’s the purpose? The brief glow of internet stardom where your mentions soar for a day or two based on someone else’s pain? The need to be vicariously part of the street-side heroics?
It hardly seems worthwhile. It’s not as though you can make the argument that the near-live tweeting of a picture of a smashed car is any kind of public service, that it is going to make that stretch of road safer for other drivers. The other drivers shouldn’t be looking at their phones anyway, and if there’s one skill that police departments, fire departments and paramedics have gotten really good at, it’s having an obviousenough presence that everyone knows they are there. They’re well visible, unless you’re concentrating, say, on your phone.
Yes, you can use your phone to get everyone else closer to the salacious and the gory and the horrendous. And yes, you can look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re not something of a dangerous, self-aggrandizing ghoul.
A hands-free dashboard video recorder can offer up road experiences that can later educate and inform other drivers without risking lives in the process. A trained news photographer, properly equipped and outfitted, can safely document the toll that accidents take, without becoming part of the accidents themselves.
Accidents should be left to the professionals. They’ve got enough on — and in — their hands without having to worry about your distracted, careless and dangerous driving.
I don’t want to belabour the point, but I’d leave you with this thought, if you’re one of the drive-by video or photo shooters — it isn’t a game.
This may never happen, but you might, just might, look closely at your phone later on and see something you hadn’t realized was in the shot, something that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
After that, the nights can be unexpectedly long.
Police forces and fire departments have plenty of examples of camera-holding drivers nearly hitting emergency workers or driving themselves right off the road.