PD Editorial: Excessive fines are distraction from justice

Steal a quick glance at a passing car.

Is the driver yakking on the phone - or, even worse, punching out a text message?

Perhaps that death-defying habit is getting a little less common.

When she reported last week on an annual crackdown on drivers with cellphones, Staff Writer Julie Johnson learned that police are issuing fewer citations than they did in the past.

In Petaluma, police handed out a dozen citations for texting and 45 for talking on a cellphone during the first half of April. Santa Rosa police cited seven drivers for texting and 62 others for various cellphone violations during the same period. Statewide, cellphone citations have declined by almost 25 percent over the past three years.

“The days of seeing everybody holding the phone up to their ears are nearly over,” Santa Rosa police Sgt. Mike Numainville said.

But, he added, that doesn’t mean that everyone complies with a five-year-old state law that limits people to hands-free cellphones if they want to chat and drive. “They’re sneakier about it,” he said. “Unfortunately, they’re still distracted.”

There’s ample research demonstrating that a driver talking on the phone is as dangerous as a drunken driver.

If that’s not reason enough to hang up the phone, consider this: A $20 cellphone fine can quickly add up to $160 or more. For a second offense, the fine is $50 and the real cost is $335. The escalating costs are even more striking for costlier tickets: a $100 fine for driving without insurance becomes $490, and a $500 citation actually costs in excess of $1,900.

Pay late or miss a court appearance, and that’s another $325 plus a potential license suspension.

A recent U.S. Justice Department report accused police and courts in Ferguson, Mo., of systematically targeting the poor and minorities for traffic offenses that fill local coffers. It isn’t hard to draw parallels in California where steep penalty assessments to pay for such things as new courthouses, court operations and air ambulance services hit the poor especially hard, quickly adding up to more than 50 hours of pre-tax earnings for minimum-wage workers.

Between 2006 and 2013, according to a new report from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and other legal aid groups, more than 4 million people - about one in six California adults - had their licenses suspended for failing to pay a court fine on time. Only 70,000 were reinstated.

Many of those people are driving anyway, risking even steeper fines in order to work.

Gov. Jerry Brown and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg have proposed amnesty programs to help more people get their driving privileges restored. That’s a start but, as with improved compliance with the cellphone law, it’s not enough. California lawmakers need to create a more transparent schedule of traffic fines and end the practice of tacking on assessments to hide the true cost of operating the state’s justice system.