A Brick police officer was luckily not injured when a vehicle struck the officer’s patrol car during a traffic stop this week – and it was caught on video.
Brick Police say, Officer Williams was conducting a motor vehicle stop this past Sunday evening when a passing motorist struck his vehicle just as he was preparing to exit his cruiser. Thankfully, despite the extensive damage to the police cruiser, Officer Williams is okay. The driver stopped after the collision and was issued a summons for Improper Passing of an Emergency Vehicle (Move Over Law).
“Too many emergency personnel get injured or killed while on the side of the road by inattentive drivers,” police said. “To protect our officers and other emergency workers while responding to an event on the roadways, New Jersey passed the Move Over Law.”
In a nutshell, the law states that if an emergency vehicle is on the side of the road with its emergency lights activated, such as in a police motor vehicle stop, drivers are to change lanes to the left, giving the officer a full lane of space. If the lane to the left is not available due to traffic, then the driver is to slow down to well below the posted speed limit before getting to the location of the emergency vehicle, and if necessary, be prepared to stop.
“Please keep our emergency workers safe. If you see an emergency vehicle with its lights activate on the side of the road and you fail to move over or significantly slow down as you pass safely, you will receive a summons, and even worse, you might seriously hurt someone.”
Nice how the officer kept his cool and even let the speeder off the hook. Just a reminder to law enforcement or anyone getting out of a vehicle in the line of traffic, please look before opening the door. I’d also like to mention, the law allows to pass slowly if you can’t mover over. Good luck and may the Almighty watch over all first responders.
So if you get pulled over for speeding and the cop’s car door gets hit, you get let off free!
The “move over” law is meant to be an extra safety measure for a cop pulled over on the shoulder to give him more space.
What am I supposed to do If the cop is in my lane with no shoulder and I have someone driving on my left, how am I supposed to move over and not hit the cop’s car? It seems that this was the case here and especially driving 50+ mph, how can it be held against the driver that hit him?!
Maybe there should be a law called, “Don’t pull over if there’s no shoulder”.
How can they issue a ticket for the move over law without seeing exactly what happened – who says it was safe to move over? Maybe it would help if the police would not use the blinding led lights – what was wrong with the old lights wasn’t cool enough??