Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew may be in some hot water tonight, but some are questioning whether it's hot enough following a fender-bender the chief said he caused.
It happened at the intersection of Boniface Parkway and Debarr Road in east Anchorage last Tuesday. The chief says he was fiddling to turn off his iPhone and thought he saw the light change. He took his foot off the brake and struck the car in front of him. "I was sitting at a stoplight and it was binging so I turned it off and I started driving ahead before I got it back into my little holster there. I shouldn’t have done that. I mean, you need to pay attention to your driving and for a moment there I made a mistake and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing,” said Mew. He said there was no visible damage to the car he hit and that after an investigation, he was given an oral reprimand by the officer in charge, as is standard procedure in the police department for a first offense when an officer is involved in an avoidable accident, according to Mew.
