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closeJail may be one of the last places around where you can find large numbers of people and none of them on cell phones.
Oddly enough, though, people in spots that could very well land them in the slammer often don’t seem to mind jabbering away on phones when police should probably have their full attention.
A couple of months back, Monroe County sheriff’s Lt. Brad Freeman was clocking speeders on Interstate 75. From his patrol car, parked along the freeway just north of Bolingbroke, Freeman caught a glimpse of a woman blowing by at better than 90 miles an hour. In the instant she zipped past, Freeman could see that she was talking on her cell phone.
When he pulled the woman over and walked up to her car, she was still chatting.
“Ma’am, how are you doing today?” Freeman said. “The reason I stopped you ...”
Freeman cut himself off. The driver was still gabbing.
“When you get through talking, ma’am, I’ll be right here,” he said. “Just don’t forget me.”
Half a minute later she hung up and, Freeman recalls, she “was not apologetic at all.”
He says it used to be that when a cop stopped someone, it was usually just the officer and the person who’d been pulled over.
“Now,” Freeman says, “you’ll have young people handing you their phones, saying, ‘Here, talk to my mom.’”
While it is illegal in some places to talk on cell phones while driving, such measures have yet to catch on in Georgia.
It is unlikely, however, that there will ever be laws governing cell phone use at the scene of routine traffic stops.
“It’s amazing,” Bibb County sheriff’s Capt. Charlie Gunnels says. “One of our guys stopped someone the other day for speeding and the first thing she did was hand him her cell phone. She’d called a policeman friend of hers. ‘Here, this policeman wants to talk to you.’ ”
Sometimes folks call friends and put their conversations with the cops on speakerphone.
“They want someone to hear the police talking to them,” Gunnels says.
Perhaps nowhere is the culture’s fondness of cell phones more evident than when someone is being hauled to jail.
“They want the cell phone more than they do their wallet or their driver’s license,” Gunnels says. “They think they have a right to take that cell phone wherever they go.”
Chief Deputy Billy Boney of the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Office says, “The phone is pretty close to being addictive and the first thing people want to do is spread the word, ‘I’m being arrested.’ ”
When a person is booked into jail, most who’ll be staying a while have their clothes and belongings — cash and phones included — stuffed in a bag and stored. Most times the phones are turned off. Sometimes the jailers forget.
“It’s amazing, the drug dealers, just how many calls they get,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills says. “Back there in the property room sometimes you can hear them going off.”
In just about every U.S. prison and jail, cell phones in inmates’ hands, for obvious reasons, are considered contraband.
Sills, who like most Georgia sheriffs oversees his county’s jail, has recently backed legislation that would make smuggling phones into state lockups a felony.
“Cell phones are hot items in jails and prisons, especially prisons,” Sills says.
In February, an ex-guard at a federal prison in south Georgia pleaded guilty to taking a $1,000 bribe — among others — from an inmate’s girlfriend to sneak in cigarettes, marijuana and a cell phone.
A story in the Baltimore Sun this month told of a Maryland prisoner who had once used a cell phone to arrange a murder from behind bars and now had been caught with another contraband phone.
“Cell phones are smuggled into prisons ... around the world by visitors, corrupt guards and, in Brazil, carrier pigeons,” the story said. “They are thrown over barrier walls, carried in body cavities and delivered by UPS. Inmates use them to run drug operations, intimidate witnesses, plan escapes, harass victims’ families and pass the time, calling girlfriends and grandmothers.”
Boney, Twiggs County’s chief deputy, says most inmates get used to going without their cell phones.
“We have phone service provided for them,” he says. “But, I mean, this ain’t Burger King. ... There ain’t gonna be no cell phone service. ... With everybody having cell phones on the block and calling each other, there wouldn’t be much order.”
But that’s not much help to cops on the streets and freeways contending with cell phone junkies and their accompanying static.
Several weeks ago, a man from south Georgia with an extensive drug-crime history was stopped on I-75 in Monroe County for driving 92 miles an hour.
In his car, he had what authorities described as “a substantial amount” of cash. The driver told deputies that he was going shopping in Atlanta.
But before he told them, he tried to hand them his cell phone.
“This is my attorney on the phone,” the south Georgian said. “He wants to talk to you.”
Freeman, the Monroe patrol lieutenant, recalls, “We hadn’t even gotten into the investigation of why this guy had all this money. ... And he’s handing us his phone, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ ”
Freeman took the phone.
“You’re making money on this call, aren’t you?” Freeman recalls asking the attorney. “I hope you’re charging by the hour, right?”
“Oh yeah,” the Brunswick attorney replied, “I’m definitely charging him for this phone call.”
“Well, sir,” Freeman said, “if you want to we’ll just keep talking.”
So they did.
Freeman says, “He just laughed and we talked about restaurants in St. Simons.”
To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
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