I was driving to my mom's house yesterday enjoying some Veggie Tales music with the boys and some very disturbed driver decided to swerve into my lane and then slam on his brakes. Apparently the car that he was barreling up on in the right lane was driving too slow so he needed to switch lanes. Why he decided to slam on the brakes is beyond me. I honked my horn and he finally sped up.
As he sped up I noticed that he was swerving and driving in two lanes of traffic. It became obvious that he was drunk, high, or who knows what. It was 10am so your guess is as good as mine. I felt like I was in a dilemna. What is the correct protocol when you see crazy and obviously impaired drivers on the road? Do you call 911 or the non-emergency police phone? If the correct protocol is non-emergency police who keeps all the surrounding city police phone numbers in their cell phone? It seemed like an emergency to some degree because this guy was seriously going to cause a wreck. As I was debating in my head about what to do he exited and swerved between two cars almost causing another wreck. I didn't have enough time to get over to the exit and I didn't get the license plate number. If I felt more confident on the correct protocol then I would have taken better action.
So, what would you have done? What IS the correct protocol?
I'm a Texan born woman transplanted across the ocean to live in England with my husband and four boys. Aside from being a stay-at-home mom, I teach birth classes for couples who want to birth naturally. My blog is about my life and how I stay sane through it all.
2 comments:
I'm pretty sure that you can call 911 - but I was reading on a runners forum about how this lady was on her morning run and got attacked by a guy and she had her cell with the local police dispatcher's number in it on speed dial and dialed it and got an actual person within a minute and because the guy heard her talking to a person he ran away. If she had called 911 she would've been on the phone for minutes before getting a person- Maybe you can program the police dispatcher's number into your phone? I don't know.
I have called 911 on a drunk driver on the interstate before (he was actually weaved between two orange barrels at one point). They took down his information - who knows what they did with it - and did not seem surprised that someone would call them to report it. However, I think the idea of having a local police dispatcher number on speed dial is a pretty good one.
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