Police in Ottawa, Canada were able to track down a woman caught texting and driving based on this motorcyclist’s helmet camera video, but they’re not happy about the rider playing vigilante traffic cop either.
Earlier this week motorcyclist Erik Hanna saw this woman texting and driving in an FJ Cruiser. So he buzzed up next to her at a stoplight and tapped on her window, presumably to tell her to stop.
Oddly she doesn’t seem notice the armored glove hitting her window, and the biker takes off seemingly shrugging off the incident.
Then it looks like the FJ nearly cleans the bike up, passing it in the same lane. Extremely uncool at best, severely dangerous at worst.
That’s when the Hanna’s rage seems to escalate, he gets the FJ to pull over, gives the driver a stern talking to (or at least the polite Canadian equivalent of one), then pursues her for a few more miles.
Here’s the “full” video uploaded by Hanna later:
It’s not totally clear whether he followed the FJ all the way to its final destination, but he did give the video to the police.
Sgt. Mark Gatien of the Ottawa police traffic enforcement unit told CBC “there is enough evidence from the video to charge the woman with texting while driving and improper lane change — but the motorcyclist could also face charges for manoeuvring between two lanes to knock on the woman’s window as she used her phone behind the wheel.”
Gatien added:
“I would caution people not to do this in the sense that he committed a couple of offences himself by splitting the lane going down the middle. I can’t prove it but he might have been speeding. In the video, by his own admission, [he] follows this lady after the fact by a number of kilometres which could have put her a bit unnervy.”
It sure looks like the driver was clueless and even dangerous here. I see people texting and driving every time I get on my own motorcycle here in Los Angeles (where we can legally split lanes and peek in their windows) but I’m way too scared of getting shot to chase somebody down to try and get them punished for bad behavior.
So is this biker another sanctimonious asshole, or is he doing the Lord’s work holding traffic court in the streets?