A Teachable Moment for Two Agencies
An unfortunate incident last fall has turned into a teachable moment about hearing loss for two state agencies in Washington.
Last fall, a Tacoma police officer stopped a man driving down a busy city street with expired license tabs. Because the driver was not responding to the officer's questions and instructions, the officer realized -- quite correctly -- that the driver had a significant hearing loss.
After writing a ticket for the license violation, the officer then made a written request to the state Department of Licensing, asking that the driver be re-tested to determine his fitness to hold a license. The stated reason -- in the officer's opinion, the inability to hear would make the man a dangerous driver, unable to hear sirens, warnings from passengers, etc. DOL complied, and required the man to pass a physical and to re-take his driving test.
The man found an advocate in Christine Seymour at the Tacoma Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center. Ms. Seymour was well aware that there is no requirement for any specific level of hearing to get a drivers' license. As the manual published by the Washington DOL specifically states, deaf drivers have just as good driver-safety records as hearing drivers, probably because we find ways to compensate for our lack of hearing, such as being much more aware of traffic behind us.
Through Ms. Seymour's persuasive advocacy, the Tacoma Police Department admitted that the officer erred in basing a re-test request on a drivers' hearing loss, and pledged that it would use this situation as a learning tool.
The DOL was another story. It took the position that it cannot question the contents of a request from a police officer, and therefore, it had to require the re-examination. At that point, Ms. Seymour asked me to help.
I did two things. First, I filed a claim with the state for the money the driver had spent on the medical examination and the wages lost because of the time required. Second, I wrote a rather firm letter to the Department of Licensing. I said that while DOL may be required to believe every word a police officer says or writes, that wasn't the issue. The issue, we pointed out, was that even if the facts stated by the officer were all true, the DOL still had to determine whether those facts constituted adequate grounds to require a re-examination, but either did not make such a determination, or made a determination at variance with its own statements about driver safety and hearing loss.
Shortly thereafter, we got a letter from the DOL acknowledging that it had been wrong to accept a request for re-test based solely on an allegation that a driver cannot hear well. Hearing loss alone, as the DOL ultimately recognized, does not make a driver unsafe.
Once DOL admitted error, the state promptly paid the claim for compensation.
Any interaction between law enforcement and a person with a hearing loss can be difficult and sometimes down-right dangerous -- our inability to hear and therefore comply with an officer's commands or questions can be interpreted as hostility and resistance. Fortunately, though, this interaction ultimately had a happy ending, and will, we hope, bring about some lasting changes in at least one police department and one agency.
