Criminal charges rare for drivers who use cellphones before crashes, safety study says

When a truck driver was convicted this month in Pennsylvania for using his cellphone in a distracted driving crash that killed a Baldwin man and his two children, it marked the end for a rare type of case.

Despite the illegality and danger of texting or holding a cellphone while driving, relatively few drivers are ever charged with the offense after a crash, nor is it frequently recorded in police crash reports.

According to a new study by the Virginia-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, police undercounted cellphone use prior to wrecks by a factor of at least seven in their crash reports. The study looked at 17,000 crashes involving drivers who had voluntarily installed a safety app on their phones, allowing the researchers to obtain anonymized telematics data.

Santos Valentin, driving a FedEx tractor trailer, looked down at his phone 25 times in the minute before the 2024 crash that killed Baldwin resident Donnell Hickson, his 18-year-old son and his 11-year-old daughter, according to the court in Pennsylvania, where the crash occurred. Prosecutors were able to prove that through dashcam footage from inside the cab.

In 2024, the last year for which complete data is available, police in Nassau and Suffolk counties reported cellphone use or texting as a factor in just 93 out of more than 21,000 personal injury crashes, and not at all in fatal crashes, according to the Albany-based Institute of Traffic Safety Management and Research.

Simply being listed as a factor in a crash report does not mean a driver was charged.

Neither the Nassau County Police Department nor the Suffolk County Police Department responded to requests for comment on the study or their current enforcement practices against distracted driving.

Part of the reason for police underreporting of cellphone use is because it can be difficult to prove after the fact, according to Aimee Cox, the study’s author.

“If you're in a crash, you are unlikely to admit you might have been using your phone,” Cox told Newsday. While police can sometimes obtain data from phones after a crash, doing so requires a warrant, can be time consuming and can raise privacy concerns, she added.

Cynthia Brown, of the Nassau County Traffic Safety Board, said she was not surprised by the study’s findings.

“We used to say it was people eating in the car, drinking their coffee, women putting on their makeup — but you know all of these other things, they pale in comparison to cellphone use,” Brown said.

The study found that “drivers tapped, swiped or otherwise manipulated their phones before hundreds of crashes.” But many crashes also involved “passive use” — that is, when the driver was not touching the device but the screen was unlocked, meaning the driver may have been looking at a map or reading or watching something on it.

Overall, about 8% of two-vehicle crashes involved cellphone use in the 30 seconds leading up to the crash, and about 4.5% involved cellphone use within 10 seconds. But police reported cellphone use in less than 1% of those crashes.

Cox said the study followed only people who opted into installing driving coaching apps on their phones — who may be using their phones even less than the average driver.

Abdulgafoor Bachani, a professor of global health at Johns Hopkins University who studies cellphone use while driving, was not involved with the new study but said it is unique and valuable.

Bachani said distractions run along a spectrum: actively swiping or texting is bad, but taking one’s eyes off the road to look at a map, or having a hands-free conversation on the phone can also increase crash risk.

He said insurance companies could offer more incentives to customers to avoid using their cellphones — such as by rewarding them for installing apps that monitor their use while driving. Likewise, cellphones could be designed with software that makes “driving mode” restrictions automatic by default when someone is in a moving vehicle, with the option to turn the restrictions off, he said.

The rise of “smart screens” on vehicle consoles is concerning because the screens can be distracting, he added.

Cox said it’s important to remind drivers that glancing away from the roadway for even two seconds is too long. 

“Attentive, focused driving with the eyes on the road is the best course of action,” she said.