by Tim Falconer
THE CAM WOOLLEY SHOW started at six o’clock on a Friday morning. Easily the best-known member of the Ontario Provincial Police, the sergeant had gathered all the props to attract reporters and crews from local television and radio stations at a service station on Highway 400 north of Toronto for the OPP’s long-weekend kick-off. A couple of days earlier, when I’d met him in his cluttered office, he’d told me, “It’ll be like O.J.’s trial.” Not quite, but along with lots of local media, the scene included fire trucks, a police boat on a trailer, paramedics with a dummy to be rescued, a driver who’d hit a moose and an officer who’d seen the collision and had some advice for how to avoid such crashes, representatives from the Ontario Safety League and the Ontario Trucking Association, and a booth with anti–drinking and driving bumpf. Even Elmer the Safety Elephant, who has been teaching kids for six decades, showed up.
Officially, May 24 (or the closest Monday before it) is a holiday to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday, but to most Canadians— many of whom can’t understand their country’s anachronistic colonial ties to a foreign country’s royal family—the long weekend in May is the start of summer. Often called the May Two-Four Weekend because a “two-four” is a case of beer, it’s an opportunity to open the cottage after the long winter, go camping or just get out of the city to party. In all the excitement, some drivers also see it as an invitation to do stupid things, so the OPP held its first highway blitz of the summer to nab people for everything from improperly installed child seats to speeding and aggressive driving to operating unsafe vehicles (including what Woolley calls “Fred Flintstone cars” because they have no floors). Highway 400 is the most heavily travelled route for people heading to cottage country—up to a million cars drive it over a long weekend—so it’s the logical spot for a command post.
Six foot two inches tall and weighing in at 280 pounds, Woolley is really just a super-sized version of Tom Hanks in Big. He’s got an eager grin, a goofy sense of boyish humour and a tendency to call everybody Buddy. A self-confessed car nut, he attended Upper Canada College, a prestigious private school for boys that churns out far more investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other lucre-chasers than cops. Since his father was a corporate lawyer who owned an interest in some GM dealerships, he drove demos—or, as he referred to them, demolitions—to school. His first one was a Chevy Vega he called The Veg-omatic. Later, he had a Nova, a Camaro, a Buick wagon, a Cadillac Eldorado and, in his last year of high school, a Corvette. After graduation in 1976, he bought a blue-and-white Blazer “when SUVs were still utility vehicles, not a fashion statement.” Over the years, he has owned about 150 cars. And he’s a partner in a company that rents cars for film and television productions (he also moonlights as a movie consultant and occasionally acts). Today, he’s the proud owner of close to twenty vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce, a convertible Mercedes, a Range Rover and a Porsche 928—all of them purchased used, and usually with some story behind the sale. The walls of his messy office are filled with awards and photographs, including one of his wife, a service manager at a GM dealership, on an armoured military vehicle called a Ferret. “It does a hundred kilometres per hour off-road and it’s bulletproof. It is all one hundred percent, except the machine gun is welded up. But the grenade launchers work good.” He buys hundreds of dollars’ of European car magazines every year, hasn’t taken public transit since high school and believes, “You are what you drive.”
A cop since 1978, Woolley put in many years as a traffic accident investigator but now spends as much as 90 percent of his time doing media work. And this was the sixth year he’d helped make the highway blitz a high-profile event. As if fines, demerit points and lost plates weren’t enough of a deterrent, part of the sergeant’s strategy was to get the force’s message out to the public by gleefully dishing details on the miscreants for reporters. His anecdotes were just too good to make up, and they would have been hilarious if they weren’t so scary, so naturally the media lapped them up: several broadcast outlets showed up at the kickoff, and all four Toronto papers ran articles based on his stories.
Even with such widespread coverage of the increased police presence on the roads, the close to two hundred officers who took part in the blitz never had trouble finding drivers to ticket or material for Woolley’s colourful cautionary tales. Some people drive right into the service station parking lot breaking the law. “We’ve had people pulling in smoking dope and drinking and”— here he made the sound of someone drawing on a joint and adopted a stoner voice—“‘Whoa, the cops, man.’”
Television reporters frequently introduced him as someone who has seen it all, but the fact is he’s constantly amazed at what people do. Some of the more memorable Woolley chestnuts include the teenager who was trying to impress his girlfriend by doing 212 kilometres per hour in his mom’s Lexus and ended up having to take his date home on the bus; the man clocked at 180 kilometres an hour who claimed he’d forgotten his wife’s birthday and was rushing to get her a gift; the woman who said she couldn’t wear her seat belt because she wanted to pet her lapdog; the truck driver who stepped out of his rig waving a bottle of vodka and wearing nothing but his underwear; and the Volkswagen Golf with the sign that read, “For sale, needs brakes.” That one prompted the sergeant to quip, “Well, there’s truth in advertising. Needed brakes. Needs a tow truck now.”
The tale he finds most staggering may be the time a couple of detectives in an unmarked car saw a Volkswagen Jetta swerving all over the southbound lanes of Highway 400. They assumed the driver was drunk, but when they caught up to him, he was furiously playing a violin. The musician, who was in his fifties, had a concert in Toronto that night and wanted to practise along the way. “If I knew classical music,” one of the detectives said, “I could have guessed what he was playing just by the way the car was moving.”
Woolley thinks people are so pressed for time, especially as commutes get longer and longer, that some drivers try to multitask. “We’re seeing a lot of folks who want to own the house of their dreams and are willing to commute from farther and farther away and they’re forgetting about the drive, so the time has to come from somewhere.”
Lately, the most common distraction for drivers has been the cell phone. Three researchers at the University of Utah found that yakkers were as impaired as drunks on the road. Their study showed that the cell phone users were 9 percent slower to hit the brakes while also showing 24 percent greater variance in how closely they followed the car in front of them because their attention shifted between the road and their conversation.
Some jurisdictions—including much of Europe, a few states and Newfoundland and Labrador—have made it illegal to use a hand-held phone while driving. In other places, it’s standard operating procedure for many drivers (even, bizarrely, in manual transmission cars). Several studies, including the University of Utah one, have suggested that hands-free units aren’t really any safer because the real distraction is the driver’s concentration on the conversation. But just let me say this about that: if I’m on the road and another driver has to react quickly, I’d really prefer that he or she had two hands available to put on the wheel.
Talking on the phone is dangerous enough, but OPP officers have also seen drivers preparing their lunch, doing their makeup, shaving, reading, checking their email, watching television and countless other activities that mean they aren’t focused on the task of driving a vehicle. Still, while Woolley’s chronicles make great copy, what causes most crashes is far more mundane. “Just being stressed out at work or home, or just daydreaming can do it, plus the actual fatigue,” he said. “The highways aren’t very forgiving.”
AT 6 A.M., the temperature was still a crisp seven degrees Celsius and the morning sun hadn’t quite burned off all the mist on the surrounding fields, but Woolley didn’t seem to mind at all. Dressed in his dark blue uniform, complete with jacket and widebrimmed hat, he was clearly enjoying himself as he bounded around, greeting shivering reporters by name
and joking with fellow officers.
Minutes before, while driving north on Highway 400, I’d passed two cars that had been pulled over by cruisers. The first, I later learned from Woolley, received a $150 ticket for speeding; the second didn’t slow down and move out of the right-hand lane before passing an emergency vehicle with flashing lights at the side of the road—a lapse in both consideration and the rules of the road that cost him $490. And at the service centre, officers dressed in mechanics’ overalls were soon checking the roadworthiness of rusted-out vans and pickups. One of the first to come in was a red Ram 350 van with bad brakes, a blown exhaust, no signals and holes in its floor. After another officer removed its licence plates, Woolley—who expected to see about fifty such vehicles over the weekend—did a live hit with a local television crew using the van as an example.
By 7:30, the OPP had given the first Breathalyzer of the day; the driver failed. By mid-morning, Dave Potwin had stopped a woman in a black Taurus station wagon after he noticed her badly smashed windshield. She handed him a handwritten insurance card. It didn’t take long for the constable to prove it was fake, give her a ten-thousand-dollar fine and take the plates off her car.
I joined the thirty-six-year-old Potwin in his cruiser just after that. A slim, fit man with light brown hair shorn short on the sides and chiselled good looks that make him appear younger than he is, he wore five-hundred-dollar Oakley sunglasses. Seven years earlier, while working as an insurance adjuster, he’d realized he wasn’t cut out for a desk job and decided to become a cop. Now, he spends most of his time on the road—but doesn’t consider himself a car guy. Like any red-blooded male, he’ll drool over a sleek Ferrari, but he drives a fire-engine-red Toyota Tercel and worries about the environment. Potwin, who maintains a letter writing correspondence with Canadian author and conservationist Farley Mowat, shakes his head when he sees how many people drive up to the cottage alone in their Escalades. “Future generations are going to judge us harshly for our overuse of resources,” he said. “The environmental costs are staggering.”
Initially, we headed north on Highway 400 as he kept his eyes out for anything out of the ordinary. “So many things stem from an expired licence sticker,” he explained. “The devil is in the details.” Sure enough, he pulled over a brown Chevrolet Celebrity with a licence sticker that was still valid but in the wrong corner of the plate. Potwin got out of his Ford Police Interceptor, a law enforcement version of the Crown Victoria, and walked to the passenger side and knocked on the window, clearly surprising the long-haired driver. Potwin always goes to the passenger side because that element of surprise means he often can spot any trouble—in this case, there was a large dog in the back seat but nothing else to worry about—but also because it’s safer. “I’ve already been hit once out here,” he told me, “and it will never happen again.” He’d been investigating a collision when a young woman in a Honda Civic hit his cruiser at a hundred kilometres per hour. The car was totalled and he was off work for six weeks recovering. (Such collisions aren’t uncommon; in fact, target fixation—or the “moth effect”—is the tendency for some drivers to involuntarily steer, like moths to a flame, into a vehicle on the side of the road because they’re looking at it instead of where they’re driving.)
After getting the driver’s licence, registration and insurance from the man in the Celebrity, Potwin used his radio to call in the details. Everything checked out, so instead of issuing a ninety-dollar fine, he let the man off with a warning. He issued another warning to a driver in a black Chevrolet Silverado pickup with a cracked windshield. As he pulled back onto the highway, Potwin floored it and moved over to the far-left lane. He’d spotted a dark grey Hyundai Accent that was speeding and following too closely behind a Jeep: “That’s aggressive driving and needs an intervention.”
The twenty-two-year-old driver, who was in his father’s car, shook as he spoke to Potwin and admitted that the police had never stopped him before. Figuring the young man would have learned a lot just from the experience, the constable let him off with a warning. The kid was so relieved that he started breathing again, though that didn’t seem to be the source of any great amusement for Potwin.
Riding in a police cruiser offered me a different perspective on the highway. I wasn’t surprised by the deference other drivers showed the marked car—at one point, a line of vehicles in all three lanes followed at a more-than-respectful distance behind us, everyone afraid to accelerate in plain view of the OPP. But I was intrigued by Potwin’s approach: rather than simply enforcing the law by handing out tickets at every opportunity, he aimed to improve road safety by managing behaviour. Sometimes that meant pulling someone over and having a chat; other times he would drive up beside a speeding driver and with a look get her to slow down. “As a rookie, I was constantly surprised at what I saw,” he admitted, adding that it came as a total shock to him that people would get drunk on a Sunday morning and then go for a drive. “My eyes have been opened and I’ve learned to expect the unexpected.”
BY THE END of the weekend, Woolley had put in sixty hours over four days and done countless interviews, while the close to two hundred officers who’d taken part in the blitz across the province had a staggering ticket tally: 6,316 for speeding, 633 for failing to wear seat belts, 177 for failing to stop at a red light or a stop sign. In addition, they’d charged 133 motorists with drunk driving and another 80 with careless driving. And still, 4 people had died on the roads.
Those numbers frustrate Woolley, but he was confident that some people were getting the message. “The whole idea is to make traffic safety marketable or interesting to the public,” he said. “If it’s just some traffic cop telling you to obey the law it’s not very newsworthy and it’s not very credible, so I try to use a bit of humour and a bit of newsworthy stuff. Sometimes the silly stuff people do is kind of funny even though it was potentially dangerous. But that gets people talking and thinking about safety.” (In January of 2007, the new commissioner of the OPP, Julian Fantino, put an end to the highway blitzes. His announcement seemed to suggest that Woolley’s use of humour undermined the seriousness of the carnage on the roads. More than a few people speculated that what the commissioner really didn’t like was the idea of anyone else being the face of the force—especially not some lowly traffic cop.)
In movies and television, a common punishment for cops who get in trouble is to be busted down to traffic, but it’s actually becoming a more prestigious assignment, in part because police forces are putting more resources into traffic than ever before. Also, far more people die in cars than in murders, and for all the glory the homicide squad garners, most cases are straightforward, not the complex whodunits of television and novels. But the accident reconstruction team often investigates difficult how-did-it-happen cases.
Woolley is passionate about safety and has been able to make a difference. In fact, the OPP’s officer of the year in 2005 has had high-profile success in pushing for legislation, including laws to hold truckers accountable for flying wheels and detached parts. Even people he’s stopped for an infraction ask for his autograph: as he writes out the ticket, he tells them, “You’re gonna get an autograph.”
During his years on the force, Woolley has seen a huge shift in attitudes toward driving. “When I joined the OPP, collisions were considered inconvenient and accidents were accidents,” he said. “You didn’t wear seat belts, drinking and driving was kind of funny and when you’re number was up, it was up. That’s the way it was.” Today, drinking and driving is no longer socially acceptable, while accidents are now called collisions and they are predictable and preventable—and people won’t stand for them. “If a loved one is injured, people don’t have the attitude that it was an accident. They want somebody held accountable.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think some attitudes still have to change, as all the tickets handed out during the highway blitz attest. In addition, street racing remains a huge and deadly problem. And despite his other
wise conservative views, Woolley sounds like a lefty when he talks about auto advertising. “Driving is still marketed as carefree and exciting, and I think that’s a mistake.” He cited SUV ads as some of the worst offenders. “We see guys wiping out all the time in SUVs. They’re going too fast because the TV ad said they could go up and down mountains. But you can’t go the speed limit on Highway 401 in a snowstorm or you’re going to find the nearest guardrail. I’ve had SUVs since 1976, and in the words of the great police philosopher Clint Eastwood, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’”
12 Colorado Springs “More Than
I Need, Less Than I Want”
“SO ANYWAY, the garage day is typically a tour to three or four club members’ homes where everyone who is interested in attending hopefully drives their Mustang if the weather cooperates,” Neil Case explained to me in an email. “We include a progressive lunch during the tour, where at the first stop the host provides an appetizer, and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour, we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have a salad and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have the main course and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have dessert and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. We will have our club meeting during that time as well, during one of the stops. Sometimes we may skip the appetizer so the day does not get long for everybody.”
Though Case was the one who responded to my request to ride along on garage day, his wife Jamie was actually the president of the Rocky Mountain Mustangers, a car club in Colorado Springs. The members take part in car shows, go on cruises, hold a swap meet and attend a monthly meeting. They also share restoration and maintenance tips with each other.