Florida Deputy Watching Porn On His Phone Crashes Into Car Stopped For A School Bus

The facts are all up there in the headline, so let’s deal with the lies first. Lots of places reported on this incident, but we’ll go to the original source, WESH TV.

Body cam footage recovered from Lake County (FL) Sheriff’s Office deputy Tristan Macomber’s body cam showed him driving southbound before hitting a stopped vehicle ahead of him, deploying his airbags. Then it showed him fishing around for his phone (which was now on the driver seat floorboard), flipping it over, taking it with him, and heading to the car he hit to apologize.

Then came all the lies.

At the scene, the deputy told officials a vehicle ahead of him was stopped for a school bus with flashing lights when the crash occurred.

Macomber said he tried to stop, but the “brakes on his patrol vehicle locked up,” the report reads.

Furthermore, Macomber advised the patrol car’s speedometer had just been calibrated and the anti-lock braking system (ABS) light had been on since.

The internal report said something else. It said the investigator noticed deputy Macomber had been “holding his cellphone” in his right hand prior to the crash. That led to a new lie:

According to the report, Macomber said he was looking at text messages from his colleagues just before the crash.

Let’s just say some of these lies were true. The second lie is the sort of thing officers cite or arrest people for doing: using their phones while driving. Even if Macomber was engaged in a discussion with fellow officers, he had an obligation to do that safely. Let’s not forget this happened directly behind a stopped school bus, which means Macomber was fortunate to hit another driver, rather than kids being loaded into/unloaded from a stopped school bus.

Investigators reviewed the recordings and saw that Macomber was definitely looking at images and not engaging with an officer-centric group chat. Furthermore, the chat group the deputy claimed to be looking at when he rear-ended an innocent person contained no images.

And, as if there’s anything else damning that really needs to be added here, there’s this:

Body camera footage shows that the deputy was not wearing his seatbelt at the time of the incident, which is another violation.

After getting his narrative shot to shit by investigators, the deputy finally admitted the truth: he had been looking at porn on his phone when he crashed into a car and, apparently, almost crashed into a school bus. But rather than take what was coming to him, Macomber resigned and presumably hopes some other law enforcement agency won’t do a bit of Googling while considering his job application.

Perhaps the best part of this debacle is that pretty much every news agency covering this has refused to sugarcoat the truth. Here’s the headline from the Express Tribune’s coverage:

Police officer crashes car while watching porn

And this is WCSC TV’s report (which contains nothing more than a recording of its newscast covering the incident), which contains a headline equally succinct:

Deputy crashes patrol car while watching porn

Finally, there’s this, which isn’t quite as fun. Here’s the official terminology for the violations Macomber engaged in while looking at porn on his phone while driving, as reported by the Miami Herald:

Officials determined he had committed three violations: departure from the truth in giving testimony or in connection with any official duties, certain use of electronic handheld devices prohibited and use of safety belt.

Even the rulebook is so reflexively exonerative, it can’t be bothered to call a lie a lie. Instead, it’s a “departure from the truth.” While it’s technically correct, it’s also worded specifically to soften the blow of the charges brought against liars with badges, as well as meant to downplay the severity of these actions. It’s a good thing the feds weren’t brought in for this. Say what you will about the routine abuse of “lying to federal officers” charges, but at least they call it lying or obstruction, rather than pretending it’s nothing more than crossing the fog line of truth.