"When I get a text from my kids... it's very tempted to take a look at it," laughs Sue Clement.
She's just like many other people who want to check their phones when it buzzes while they're driving, but she and her husband try to keep themselves from checking until they can pull over at a rest stop to focus on a call or return a text.
"You've gotta be careful," says Clement with a smile.
In an effort to crack down on distracted driving, and as part of distracted driving month, MSP is getting into unmarked cars and acting as ghosts in "operation ghostrider."
"We'll do a detail where we'll work 94 and there will be a whole squad of troopers and we'll pay attention to distracted driving and we'll call out troopers to initiate stops, and that's helped a lot," explains MSP trooper Scott Williams. "However, we're not able to do those details all the time."
It's not easy when troopers are in marked cars. Williams says people tend to drive a lot more carefully when they see a police officer behind them or on the freeway.
"Even if they're doing nothing wrong and we're just driving behind somebody, you'll see them checking their mirror, and getting nervous," describes Williams.
That's why MSP has started operation ghostrider. If a police officer rides around in an unmarked car, drivers may not notice and won't put their phone down. That makes catching them a lot easier.
Otherwise, a trooper has to try and rely on signs that a person is driving distracted like swerving or not going at a green light.
"They could just be dazing off," explains Williams, "but most of the time they're on a phone, they're checking something, they're leaning down looking at something--they're distracted somehow."
