Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for five seconds. At 55 miles an hour, the federal government says, that is the length of an entire football field — driven with your eyes closed. In 2024 distracted driving killed 90 Virginians and injured 11,256. Deaths jumped 40.6% in a single year.

You didn’t need the statistics. You saw it on the way to work.

One hand on the wheel. The other holding a phone at chin height. Eyes down, then up, then down again, on Route 50 and Braddock and the Fairfax County Parkway, past your kid’s bus stop, at fifty feet per second.

And you have leaned on the horn at the car that sat through a green light — three, four, five seconds of an empty intersection while the driver ahead of you finished a thought that couldn’t wait. You knew exactly what they were doing. You were right.

You don’t have to be an undercover cop to see that drivers are more distracted than they have ever been. So why does nobody in Fairfax County do anything about it?

Five years. A hundred and ten more tickets.

Fairfax County police publish every ticket they write to a public database. Nobody reads it. We did.

In 2021, when Virginia’s hands-free law took effect, Fairfax officers wrote 1,187 tickets to drivers holding a phone. In 2025 they wrote 1,297.

That is a hundred and ten more tickets. In five years. In a county of 741,000 licensed drivers.

It is not that Fairfax police stopped writing tickets. They nearly doubled them — 36,766 in 2021, 69,793 last year, the most in seven years. They are out there. They are writing. Phones went from 3.25% of their tickets to 1.86%.

Everything else got attention. The thing you watch out your windshield every morning did not.

One of these already reached Steve Descano’s desk

Normally this is where we’d suggest the Commonwealth’s Attorney — Fairfax County’s top prosecutor — take an interest in the matter.

Save your breath. One of these cases already landed on his desk.

William Glass was 86 years old and had been married to his wife Phairak for 55 years. A driver holding a phone hit his minivan. William Glass died.

The Fairfax detective who worked that crash wrote it up as reckless driving — a Class 1 misdemeanor, twelve months in jail. Steve Descano’s office downgraded it to holding a phone while driving.

The driver paid $125. He did not spend one night in jail. Police never even examined his phone.

“There’s no justice, no nothing,” Glass’s granddaughter Callie Williams said. “What’s going to stop them from doing it again?”

Nothing. That’s the answer. Nothing is going to stop them.

He has time to write policies. Just not this one.

Descano is not a man short on priorities. He stopped prosecuting marijuana possession on his first day in office. He has never asked for cash bail. He refuses to seek the death penalty. He signed a twelve-page plea-bargaining policy with an entire section devoted to weighing a defendant’s immigration consequences — and his campaign promised it in plain English: “Wherever possible, Steve will make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences.”

Twelve pages. A full section. He knows how to put a priority in writing.

He has never written one about the phone.

Virginia even handed him the tool. State law attaches a $250 mandatory minimum fine to reckless driving committed with a phone in hand — the legislature’s one attempt at teeth. Descano’s own plea policy instructs his prosecutors to strike mandatory minimums built exactly that way. So when a Fairfax phone case crosses his desk, do his prosecutors strike it? He knows. We don’t.

And Richmond just made it easier to walk

Two weeks ago, with no press conference, Virginia Democrats made a first hands-free offense disappear entirely. As of July 1, a judge may wipe it out if you sit through a driving class — “in lieu of a conviction.” That sentence is new. It wasn’t in the Code in September. It wasn’t there in May.

Deaths up 40.6%. Their answer: a class.

The $125 the Glass family got is now, for a first offense, potentially nothing at all.

Steve Descano’s term runs through 2027. Every Democrat on the Board of Supervisors is on the ballot in November 2027.

Between now and then you will pull up behind somebody at a green light who isn’t looking up. You’ll honk. He’ll go. And if he kills somebody on the way home, Fairfax County has already shown you the price: $125, and only if a detective’s charge survives the Commonwealth’s Attorney.