CHEERED AND FEARED
Hands-free calling while driving bill sees praise and opposition
The forward momentum on the state’s hands-free driving bill encourages road-safety advocates — but the NAACP says the legislation may yet do more harm than good.
Juan Cofield, president of the New England Area Conference of the NAACP, said his organization continues to oppose the legislation unless it contains a provision that would require police to keep racial data on all stops made under the new law. He said he fears that creating a new reason to pull people over will result in a disproportionate number of people of color being stopped.
“The issue of distracted driving does not outweigh the harm to black folks,” Cofield told the Herald. “We can gather data to determine whether or not improper stops are still being made.”
Sen. Joe Boncore and Rep. William Straus, who lead the Joint Committee on Transportation, announced Friday night in a statement that a conference committee between the House and Senate have hammered out a compromise on a bill that would crack down on distracted driving.
The bill would aim to cut down on people using handheld phones while driving, with both the House and Senate versions of the bill requiring all functions to be handsfree-only for drivers.
Emily Stein of the Safe Roads Alliance said it’s important for the Legislature to get the bill passed this week and for Gov. Charlie Baker, who supports such a change, to sign it on Friday.
“Every elected official can go home to their families on Thanksgiving and know they did something to save lives,” said Stein, whose father was killed in 2011 by someone programming their GPS. “There are approximately 40 more seats that will be empty at the table this Thanksgiving because of distracted driving.”
She said data hasn’t shown that hands-free laws passed by any other states have resulted in an uptick in racial profiling.
It’s still unclear what’s quite in the compromise bill, and neither Straus nor Boncore responded to requests for comment on Saturday to shed any further light on that.
“The new legislation will restrict the use of hand-held cellphones while operating a motor vehicle and update existing law regarding racial profiling by law enforcement,” according to the Friday statement.
The conference committee has gone around and around on a compromise between the version that passed the state Senate and what passed in the House, at one point announcing a compromise and then scuttling it over the summer.
A major difference between the two bills is what data would have to be collected from police. The House version would only require cops to keep track of data from stops that ended in citations, while the Senate version would require demographic data to be recorded for every distracted-driving stop. Under the Senate version — more or less what Cofield is advocating for — that data also would be more publicly accessible.
The chairmen plan to file the conference report with the agreedupon language with the body’s clerks on Monday, with the legislation to be reviewed by the other members of the Legislature during the week, according to the statement.