If you follow @trafficservices on TikTok, you’ve heard Constable Sean Shapiro answer hundreds of questions about traffic laws and road safety or even had some of your own questions answered. Shapiro knows what he’s talking about and delivers the good word about road safety with his blend of enthusiasm and a voice seemingly made for radio.
Shapiro has been with the Toronto Police Service since 2000 but served in various roles before becoming a police officer 12 years ago. He was also a motor squad officer and part of the Criminal Investigations Branch before moving to his current position in media relations.
Shapiro has seen almost everything you can imagine, and we recently spoke with him about his experiences as a traffic services officer. He hasn’t been on the road for five years because of a collision, but he still has much to share.
“It’s incredibly scary how bad our drivers are,” he says. “I’ve seen all sorts of things. I caught a guy on Lake Shore who was doing 110 km/h and that might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a road with a 60 km/h speed limit and they were on a motorcycle, and it was a situation where he was a professional driver, and the guy lost his vehicle and his licence, and he was in a really bad spot.
“Never mind the fact he tried to get away. He slowed down and I was standing in the middle of the road, and he tried to drive around me. At one point, he and I met in the middle, and he pressed his motorcycle up against me when he lost balance trying to get away, and I reached over, turned off the ignition to his motorcycle, and he yells, ‘What are you doing?’
“He claimed he thought I was a construction worker, but the six-inch letters across my chest that said “P-O-L-I-C-E” suggested he may not have been telling the truth.”
On roads like Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, there are pedestrians, cyclists, streetcars, and about a thousand things happening at the same time. The speed limits are in place to keep everyone safe and are not a suggestion or a starting point.
“I was doing speed enforcement, and a guy who I stopped going a fair clip above the speed limit said his excuse was he ‘really had to go the washroom,’” Shapiro says. “So, I got his licence, ownership, and insurance, and followed him to the bathroom. I don’t know if he sat in the washroom and waited 15 minutes, but after, he was actually quite shocked that he got a ticket. There’s no excuse.”
Shapiro spends his days educating the public on the @trafficservices TikTok channel. He’s an expert on just about every traffic law and is an ardent follower of those laws. He tells us that they are in place to keep the public safe, and there is no hidden agenda.
Shapiro is also a certified child safety seat technician who trains people to install them correctly. He’s seen his fair share of parents risking their children’s lives by not installing the seats correctly.
“I was [driving] on Sheppard and Yonge, and I looked over to my left. The passenger was using a laptop and the driver was on his phone. I noticed there was also a baby in the back seat, so I pulled them over, and I checked the seat,” he says. “What was shocking about this was that the seat was not even attached to the vehicle. The child was strapped into the seat, but the seat was not attached in any way, shape, or form to the vehicle. Needless to say, they got a number of charges that day. And that was something that would have guaranteed a fatality or a very high chance of it. That was something that was just beyond belief to me.”
Not many of us truly grasp the dangers of driving a motor vehicle every time we get behind the wheel. Even a small car can weigh upwards of 1,300 kg and larger SUVs are sometimes double that. When you accelerate that mass to highway speeds, the potential energy stored in the vehicle is similar to a bomb.
“People drive at high speeds and travel in the opposite direction every day, and all have varying skill levels,” says Shapiro. “It can be described as a scary video game, but in real life.”
That’s why Shapiro’s work to educate the public on safe driving practices and following the rules and laws to ensure their own safety is so important.
We get it; our lives are busy, our schedules are packed, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. But speeding to make up time or breaking the law is always the wrong thing to do and, more importantly, the unsafe thing to do. Police officers like Shapiro are there to keep us safe, first and foremost.
“People don’t like getting tickets. People don’t like being told they’re wrong. I hear the average person online saying that we’re just here for the money grab, that it’s not about safety, and they couldn’t be more wrong,” says Shapiro. “We don’t have quotas, we don’t have an obligation to write tickets in a particular style or way. There are laws, you break them, we get you, we write it down. That’s it.”
