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Since You Asked: Medford police do cite for cellphone violations Sunday Jan 14, 2018 at 3:43 PM Jan 14, 2018 at 3:43 PM I continue to see many drivers using their cellphones and texting while driving their cars in Medford. Why don't (police) do a better job of enforcing the ban on drivers? If you ask me, the sheriff's office and Medford police ought to set up weekly stings throughout the city and county. Can you find figures for 2017 and publish it? Thank you, Chuck B.   As of now, police are still working on data for 2017, as the numbers for November and December have not been completed, according to Lt. Kerry Curtis. Those two months are also the second and third months under Oregon's law that bans cellphone use while driving, or House Bill 2597, which went into effect Oct. 1, 2017. All that to say that this number of citations for 2017 is certainly an incomplete picture right now. But it's what we got. From January to October 2017, Medford police issued 69 cellphone-related driving citations, according to police data. For all of 2016, police wrote 76. Those citations can either be for a class B violation (when the violation is a first time offense and does not cause an accident), or a class A violation (if the violation is a second-time offense or causes an accident on the first one), according to the Oregon Department of Transportation. A first-time offense can result in up to a $1,000 fine, while the second can result in a fine up to $2,500. A third offense within 10 years gets bumped up to a class B misdemeanor crime, with up to $2,500 in fines and up to six months in jail, ODOT says. The law does not apply to hands-free devices or those built into vehicles, provided the driver is at least 18 years old. There's actually a pretty handy fact sheet on all the particulars at http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Safety/Documents/HB2597_Summary_for_Public.pdf. Medford police officers on the traffic and patrol teams do give out citations for such violations, but they don't have dedicated units focusing just on distracted driving. In bigger cities, he added, such teams exist. They employ methods such as decoys on city buses, officers that look for drivers using their phones while stopped at a red light. Then they just radio an officer in the area. "The purpose of the law is to reduce traffic crashes," Ivens said. "Obviously, if we see an increase in crashes related to cellphone use, we'll try to come up with something." — Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to [email protected]. We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them.