WEST LEBANON — When it comes to texting while at the wheel and other dangerous driving habits, Lebanon police are hitting the streets to send a message to motorists.
The Lebanon Police Department dispatched a dozen officers in cruisers — some unmarked — in a “saturation patrol” along Route 12A in West Lebanon and Route 120 in Lebanon on Thursday to combat what it says has been a spike in reckless driving incidents such as talking on the phone, texting, speeding, running red lights and DWIs.
“We’ve seen a significant rise in the past months in motor vehicle accidents and received a bunch of road rage complaints, especially speeding up and down in this area, people blowing red lights … hand gestures, things like that,” Lt. Alan Lowe, bureau commander of the department’s patrol division, said after he pulled his cruiser into the Upper Valley Plaza on Route 12A midway through his shift of patrolling the busy shopping and lunchtime corridor.
Lowe, along with his boss, Lebanon Police Chief Phil Roberts, and a squad of officers patrolling up and down Route 12A — while other officers in unmarked vehicles discreetly set back from the road to spot violators radioed ahead to waiting colleagues to nab the approaching vehicles — said the objective of the first day’s operation was “educational” to deter bad driving habits that lead to collisions.
Although motor vehicle infractions seem like comparatively minor offenses — most charges are taken care of by pleading guilty and paying a fine — they are the major cause of crashes that result in costly vehicle damage, injury or fatality, according to police.
“The main focus today is awareness with the goal of modifying driving behavior. Hopefully this will have an impact,” Lowe said. “The holidays are coming up, and things are only going to get crazier out here.”
By the end of Thursday’s four-hour “saturation patrol” between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., Lebanon police officers had stopped 99 cars and issued six summonses, reported Chief Roberts — and at least one of the six was for a driver wanted on a warrant for another charge.
“We’re advertising this publicly because our goal is compliance,” Roberts said.
But, after the awareness hopefully generated by Thursday’s blitz along Route 12A and Route 120 — the two most heavily trafficked corridors in the city — Roberts said officers will not be as forgiving with off-with-a-warning notices when the enhanced patrols resume in a second phase next week.
The enhanced patrol operation is made possible by a $16,873 grant from the New Hampshire Office of Highway Safety, money specifically aimed at enforcing motor vehicle violations and which Roberts said will go toward paying overtime for the officers conducting the patrols.
More disturbing, Roberts said, is a sharp rise after two years of decline in the number of DWI arrests this year.
Through the first 10 months of 2022, Lebanon police have arrested 78 drivers on DWI charges, compared with 53 for the same period in 2021, on track to reach or exceed the 88 DWI arrests in 2019.
“We normally average between six to eight DUI arrests a month. For October, we had 18,” Roberts said. “It’s alarming, from our standpoint.”
Motor vehicles stops in total through the first nine months of the year are up 30.6% to 3,948, with warnings up 28.9% to 3,647 and the number of citations issued up 35.3% to 279, according to department data.
The number of crashes, meanwhile, is virtually flat: 534 through September versus 530 for the same period last year.
“It’s across the board, practically everything,” Roberts said about the kind of motor vehicle violations his officers are reporting. “Aggressive driving, tailgating, speeding, failing to yield, distracted driving, not stopping at red lights or for pedestrians at the crosswalk.”
Roberts said he’s not sure of the reason for the increase in dangerous driving but suspects it is one of the downstream effects of the pandemic during which many police jurisdictions reduced the frequency of routine traffic stops in order to minimize in-person interactions between officers and drivers.
“People got accustomed to lighter enforcement,” Roberts hypothesized.
(In 2019, the last year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Lebanon PD reported a total of 5,737 motor vehicle stops, including 197 citations and 88 DWI arrests).
On Thursday, however, the emphasis was on warnings rather than issuing citations, which are usually settled with a fine or, if the driver wants to challenge it, a hearing in district court.
Spotting a female driver on her phone while in line to exit from the Powerhouse Mall Plaza to turn left and drive south on Route 12A, Roberts threw the switch to activate the flashing blue lights and trailed until she pulled into the truck service entrance of Upper Valley Plaza.
Roberts radioed in the license plate number to check on the vehicle’s registration, then exited his police cruiser to approach the driver’s side window. He talked with the driver for a couple minutes and then came back to his vehicle, letting her go on her way with a warning.
“She was very apologetic and nice. She said she thought it was OK to use the phone when the car is not moving,” Roberts related. “That’s not an unusual misconception.”
Lebanon police officers said they are encountering a general rise in incivility during interactions with the public, which became noticeable with the onset of the pandemic, and more frequent “anger management”-type incidents that escalate quickly into dangerous situations.
In August, for example, a 41-year-old Massachusetts man was charged with assault after he left his vehicle on Route 12A near the 110 Grill and allegedly attacked a group of pedestrians with bear spray.
But on an unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon, Lebanon police said the vehicle stops were without incident.
“There are a lot of decent people out here; everyone’s been polite,” Lowe said. “A lot of this is just education.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
