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Sugar Land and Missouri City police department officials say they want to make their cities safer, both taking steps to examine ordinances restricting phone use while driving and pushing license plate recognition cameras.

Sugar Land and Missouri City are already deemed two of the safest cities in Texas and the nation with crime rates for both cities about 40 percent below the state average and about 48 percent below the national average, according to statistics from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the city of Sugar Land.

The Sugar Land Police Department wants to continue its safety efforts by instituting an ordinance restricting mobile device use while driving. The Missouri City Police Department, on the other hand, wants to further restrict its current ordinance limiting phone use while driving.

“It’s just kind of out there more and more, and you’re noticing the accidents that are caused by it, and a lot of cities are passing those ordinances where you can’t do it,” said Sugar Land Police Department Assistant Chief Scott Schultz.

Additionally, Sugar Land is testing the use of license plate recognition cameras at the city’s entrance points in northern Sugar Land. Police department officials are considering whether it would be useful to install more cameras at other entrance points to help with investigations, Schultz said. Missouri City wants to try out license plate recognition cameras on several police vehicles. 

“It’s just an incredible investigative tool,” Missouri City Police Department Chief Mike Berezin said.

Texting and driving

The Sugar Land Police Department has proposed three options to City Council for the use of mobile devices while driving.

The first would be to make it illegal to use a mobile device for texting and using applications while driving. However, making phone calls behind the wheel would still be a legal use of the phone, Schultz said.

A second option would ban hands-on mobile device use, and a third option would be to have no ordinance at all. Schultz said an ordinance would follow suit to what about 60 other Texas cities are doing.

He said in 2015, 116 accidents in the city were attributed to either driver inattention or distraction in a vehicle, which is as specific as the department’s reports are. He said no fatalities occurred in this accident category to his knowledge.

“I can’t say that was strictly a telephone call or a text message,” he said. “It may have been a bee flying in the car. I don’t know because it doesn’t get into that detail but we did have 116 that it could be attributed to. With that 116 accidents, that’s well over $200,000 in property damage right there alone.”

Neighboring Missouri City has had an ordinance since 2010 restricting phone use while driving in the city. The city ordinance bans texting and other activities. He said the police department is looking to Sugar Land to see if it adopts a completely hands-free ordinance to determine whether Missouri City wants to further restrict its own drivers in the same way.

“If they’re successful with that, then I would suggest that we would bring that before our [City] Council and amend our ordinance to also include that,” he said.

He said the reason for a potential change is also practical.

“Oftentimes, citizens don’t know when they’re crossing city boundaries, so if you have one large city doing that, it makes sense [for] adjacent cities having the same problems [to do the same], so it’s not so confusing when you can and when you can’t [use the phone] for the traveling motorist.”

In addition to making an ordinance easier for residents, Berezin said not having a hands-free ordinance makes enforcement difficult for police officers.

“There’s a few loopholes in the ordinance,” Berezin said. “You can make an emergency phone call, you can check a navigation device, things of that nature. It’s a bit of a challenge for when an officer does cite someone. It’s hard for them to stand up in court and say ‘Oh, no, they definitely were accessing one of those [banned] applications.’”

Although numerically a local ordinance might not be significant, Schultz said it would still be worth it.

“If it saves one life, would it be necessary?” he asked. “We’re looking to make the driving public a little bit safer.”

Schultz said he will continue to collect community feedback with an online town hall on the city’s website as well as at homeowner association meetings. He does not have a date set to close the town hall and return to City Council.

As of Aug. 17, 60 people responded to the online town hall stating their preference for an ordinance or lack thereof.

Of those respondents, 35 people wanted a completely hands-free ordinance while 9 preferred texting and application prohibition but not phone call restriction. Sixteen respondents did not want an ordinance.

“Law enforcement is already asked to do too much,” Sugar Land respondent Edward Fox said. “Their focus must be on objective observation of how vehicles are operating, not struggling to figure out what’s going on inside each vehicle.”

License plate cameras

Both Sugar Land and Missouri City’s police departments are also looking to use license plate recognition cameras in their cities as a crime deterrent and to assist with investigations.

Sugar Land has had LPR technology since 2007, Chief Doug Brinkley said during an Aug. 2 presentation to City Council.

In September 2015, however, the department started operating 73 cameras in northern Sugar Land, testing to see if cameras should be used across the city. Brinkley said the cameras are helpful to investigations.

“Most of the time [when] we have home break-ins or car break-ins, our citizens see something,” Brinkley said. “They may see a brown vehicle or a black pickup truck, and we endeavor to use the license plate recognition camera to actually identify the suspects involved in those types of activities.”

Brinkley told the City Council he now wants six more months of study to help determine the cameras’ effect on arrests and crime before the council would make a decision. Using LPR technology from January to June, the department recovered 38 stolen vehicles with a total value of about $314,000, Brinkley said. With help from the LPR system, the department arrested 38 people from January to June, Brinkley said.

“Hopefully, it’s going to be a promising deterrent as we move forward,” Brinkley said.

Berezin said the Missouri City Police Department applied for a grant of $59,000 from the Houston-Galveston Area Council requesting mobile cameras to use on police vehicles. Missouri City does not have any license plate recognition cameras, so this would be a first step, Berezin said.

“As it is now, we have to hand enter each one of them into the computer while driving,” Berezin said.

Berezin said if Missouri City gets the grant for the cameras, it would be enough to outfit at least three police vehicles.

“That system is reading license plates just as fast as they’re driving through the mall, so if there is a stolen car or a car associated with a crime—kidnapping, whatever the case may be­—it automatically notifies the operator of that license plate reader system,” he said.