Shawn Mansfield drives I-95
for a living, occasionally at 120 miles an hour. Five days a week you’ll find him in his
super-charged muscle car, sipping a coffee and listening to his FM radio,
driving up and down the highway starting at 5:30 am. You see, Shawn is a Connecticut State
Trooper.
“I love my job,” he tells me
during a recent ride-along in his unmarked car as I was squeezed next to his
on-board computer and wearing an under-sized bullet-proof vest.
Shawn’s been a Trooper for
almost three years following a stint as a corrections officer and six years in
the US Navy, including a deployment to Afghanistan. “Six years in the Navy and I was never on a
ship,” he says as we race down the interstate enroute to an accident.
It’s 8:30 am and the
southbound highway is bumper-to-bumper, yet he weaves his way through the cars,
choosing not to drive on the breakdown lane.
“There’s too much debris there,” he says, adding that he loves to issue
tickets to impatient motorists who think the “emergency rescue lane” is their
express lane through the delays.
He’s also quick to ticket
trucks driving in the left lane. But his
favorite targets are “distracted drivers”, especially people on their
cell-phones. Sure enough, we stealthily
pass a Colorado van with the guy oblivious to our unmarked police vehicle.
Shawn pulls him over and the
driver immediately ‘fesses up. “Honesty
is always the best policy,” says Shawn, issuing the out-of-stater a $150 ticket
for his first offense. Troopers’ cars
even have an on-board printer so they can hand the driver the citation and a
pre-addressed envelope.
In the course of four hours
we make four stops, most of them accidents… a few rear-enders in congested I-95
traffic, another on Super 7. In addition
to tickets for “following too close”, several stops found unregistered vehicles
or unlicensed drivers. “She won’t be
going anywhere today,” he says as we watch a tow-truck remove her from the
highway.
Even illegal aliens can get
a Connecticut driver’s license, and should.
But illegals have nothing to fear from their interactions with State
Troopers… or nothing more than any other motorist. “We don’t toss anybody to ICE (Immigration
Customs Enforcement)” he notes.
At every stop Shawn uses his
onboard laptop to “run” the license plates of the vehicles involved as well as
their drivers’ licenses. He writes up
his accident reports on the scene with his dispatchers at Troop G in Bridgeport
able to follow every key-stroke. They
also know his location, minute-by-minute, thanks to the GPS transponder mounted
on his roof… the only telltale sign that his super-charged speedster is part of
the State Police.
In each case, the motorists
involved in the accidents are patient and friendly, some of them even shaking
hands after receiving their citations. “You
can be a nice guy and still do your job,” Shawn said with a smile.
But sometimes, he says, he
has to break up fights. Or deal with people
who don’t speak English. “My Spanish
isn’t great”, he says, “but one time I used Google Translate to talk with a
Korean gentleman.”
Next week, our discussion with
Shawn about speeding on our interstates.
Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media.
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