Ed Kemmick
Dear inebriated motorist: These are houses. People live in them. Please leave them alone. Don't feel you have to be part of some silly trend.
When I saw last week that another Billings motorist had plowed into a house, and that “speed and alcohol were factors in the crash,” I felt it was time to call it a trend.
I knew from my long career in the newspaper biz that reporters love trends, and that editors love them even more. Reporting on individual incidents can get a bit repetitious and dull, but when you get enough of them in a cluster, it becomes a Big Picture story, or even an Important Social Issue story.
The trick, of course, is deciding when a string of incidents has become a trend. It’s most impressive if you can do the research and demonstrate a major shift in behavior.
Ed Kemmick
You would be on pretty solid ground if you began a trend story like this: “An analysis of the attire seen at nine of the city’s largest churches over a six-week period showed a 48 percent increase in the number of people wearing pajama bottoms to services, compared with results of a similar study conducted five years ago.”
If you don’t have the numbers, you might need to find a respected authority figure — your local mayor, a college president, Ann Landers or Google — who is willing to declare something a trend.
I tried the research route first, meaning I put in phone calls to the county attorney’s office, justice court and the police department. Unfortunately, no one had any firm numbers, though there were offers to do further research.
I declined, thinking the authority figure angle might yield better, quicker results. Bingo! Billings Police Chief Rich St. John was obliging, though he was a little hesitant at first to call the phenomenon of drunken drivers hammering into houses a trend.
“But don’t you think,” I pressed, “that it seems like there’s been a lot more of these incidents in the past five or six years than there were in the past, like, say, 15 or 20 years ago?”
He pondered that for a moment and replied, “I’d say your assessment’s pretty fair.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a trend. And once you’ve established that there is a trend, it’s time to delve into the possible reasons for the trend, to search for Underlying Causes. St. John’s first and rather unsatisfactory answer was to point out that Billings just keeps getting bigger.
“We’ve got more people out and about doing stupid people tricks,” he said.
That seemed too obvious to me, and it had the further demerit of making the trend seem less important, which was the last thing I wanted to do. I asked St. John if it was within the realm of possibility that these were “copycat” incidents, you know, where people read about motorists smashing into houses and decide, subconsciously or not, to give it a try themselves.
“I truly don’t see anybody doing it intentionally,” he said.
I knew it was time to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, Chief Deputy County Attorney Rod Souza and Justice of the Peace Pedro Hernandez weren’t much more helpful.
Souza said that perhaps in the past DUI accidents didn’t get the attention they deserved, and that stronger enforcement efforts might be behind the heightened awareness. He also said it’s possible that more and more people are driving under the influence of multiple intoxicants, mixing alcohol with prescription narcotics, meth and weed.
This was starting to look like a trend mashup, which I didn’t have time for. I figured Hernandez, who has been a justice of the peace since people were driving Flintstones cars, surely would have noticed the spike in car-into-house crashes.
He wouldn’t go that far. He did say, however, that the high number of drivers with multiple DUIs might mean that more people are driving with more booze in their systems. Not much to go on there, either.
Luckily, this is a column, not a news story, so I am free to indulge in idle speculation, supposition and serious chin scratching. I think there is definitely a trend, and something needs to be done about it.
Maybe it’s our educational system. When I was young, driver’s ed instructors told us over and over and over, DO NOT drive your motor vehicles into houses. Are today’s instructors coddling our youth, wanting to be their friends rather than their teachers, and failing to emphasize these important lessons? Could be another trend.
Or maybe houses are getting too big. Used to be you could drive off the road and you might be able to miss a house. It’s getting harder and harder to do so. So let’s at least applaud those homebuilders who put the four- and five-car garages right out front, to protect sleeping families.
Another disturbing trend has to do with road design. In the old days, when engineers were in charge of such things, streets were laid out in straight, orderly lines. Now, real estate agents are apparently designing streets, so that every stretch of road has appealing curves. There is also an abundance of cul-de-sacs, formerly known as dead ends, to the point where even sober drivers find it difficult to avoid colliding with houses.
So, what can we, as a society, do? I wish I knew. I would only appeal to everyone to do something, anything, before the trend becomes a mega-trend. By then it might be too late.
