United Nations Global Road Safety Week continues.
No matter how many safety features carmakers install, and no matter how many rules of the road the authorities put on the books, there are some drivers who just aren’t going to do the right thing.
In the early 2000s, Irish authorities thought they’d come across one of them, a habitually reckless driver who racked up ticket after ticket after ticket, but the actual story was a lot weirder than that.
At some point, local police in Ireland had issued a ticket to a Polish driver under the name of Prawo Jazdy.
And along the line someone working in a shared database of traffic violators noticed that this Prawo Jazdy was in the system like 50 times.
There were all kinds of speeding tickets, moving violations, traffic fines, if there was a law or a regulation, this driver was breaking it.
Ordinarily this might prompt someone from a nearby constabulary to see if there was a way to revoke this perp’s driving privileges, since they clearly weren’t taking the roads seriously.
Or they might drop by the individual’s place of residence to bring them on account of being a threat to public safety.
But when an officer in the traffic division of the Irish Garda took a look at the full record for this person, they saw red.
There were dozens of addresses connected to the one driver, a different one for each of these dozens of violations.
Not even crooks tend to move that often.
To figure out why a Polish driver would come to Ireland, commit many driving offenses and move after each of them, the officer did a Google search under the driver’s name.
And they quickly realized that the name wasn’t a name at all.
In Polish, “Prawo Jazdy” means “driving license.”
This meant that there wasn’t one person wreaking havoc behind the wheel all over Ireland, just a bunch of different people whose offenses had all been lumped together because the responding officers had all misread which part of the Polish-language IDs showed the driver’s first and last name.
The department sent out a memo all over the country explaining the issue and the mystery of what they thought was the worst driver in all of Ireland was solved.
As the Irish Times noted at the time, “Expect the recidivist Mrs Library Card from the Czech Republic to have her cover blown.”
Underway this week in Washington state, it’s the Spokane Lilac Festival.
It started in the 1930s as a way to showcase the city’s spring flowers; today it’s also a tribute to local military servicemembers, including what they say is the “largest armed forces torchlight parade in the nation!”
Dictionary helps crack case of notorious Polish serial offender (Irish Times)
Spokane Lilac Festival (Visit Spokane)