If you’ve got one hand on the wheel and another pressing a phone against your head, you better steer clear of Officer Ramon Solidum. He doesn’t want to brag, but he considers himself the “super cop” of Chicago’s cell-phone ban.
Two years after Chicago outlawed the use of hand-held cell phones while driving, police officers are issuing more citations than ever, and Solidum is leading the pack.
The city’s 13,600 officers had issued 25,432 cell-phone citations through mid July, and the median number of tickets issued by each officer was 2, according to a Tribune analysis of city data.
Patrolling the Loop, Solidum has written 771 of those tickets, single-handedly accounting for more than 3 percent of the total.
“Getting three or four [cell-phone citations] is enough for some officers,” Solidum said. “For me, there’s no such thing as enough.”
Solidum, 43, said he has witnessed four accidents caused by cell-phone use. “I give a ticket and say, ‘This may save your life sometime.’ “
In 2005, Chicago became the second major U.S. city to ban motorists from using hand-held cell phones while driving. Drivers are permitted to talk on hands-free devices. An analysis of city records shows that few people avoid paying the ticket in Traffic Court. More than two-thirds of drivers issued tickets for using hand-held cell phones are found guilty.
The records also show that police issued more cell-phone citations in each month of 2006 than the same month of 2005. This year has seen a general increase from 2006. For example, police issued 1,279 tickets in January 2007, a 55 percent increase from the number issued in January 2006.
The data show that Solidum and his colleagues don’t simply slap on cell-phone citations after they have pulled over drivers for more serious violation. In nearly two-thirds of the cases, the cell-phone ticket was the only citation the officer wrote during that traffic stop.
These findings call into question the widespread assumption that the city’s cell-phone ordinance is not enforced, a belief the ordinance’s sponsor, former Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd), shares. “I talked to the Police Department, and I surmised this is not a priority,” Natarus said. “It’s not enforced the way it should be.”
