The Toronto Transit Commission wants you to quit playing paparazzi with its employees.

The please-don’t-play-gotcha request comes after at least three TTC drivers were caught on camera this week by shocked passengers who observed them texting or chatting on cellphones while operating buses.

“We ask that people not do that,” TTC spokesman Brad Ross said Friday. “We don’t require photographic evidence to discipline drivers. Cameras in the face of operators can escalate a situation that doesn’t need to be escalated.”

Instead of snapping photos, “we ask that they call us, report the bus and route number and date and time of the occurrence,” Ross said.

The TTC has disciplined employees for texting while driving before without pictures. Cellphone records, for example, can be used in internal investigations.

York University student Robert Sauer, who took video of a bus driver apparently chatting on his cellphone while driving earlier this week, worries that without it there wouldn’t be enough to go on to punish drivers responsible for “endangering the safety of the public.”

“Then it really just seems like it’s our word against their word,” said Sauer, who used his iPhone as he rode on the 196 University Rocket from York to Downsview station. “Obviously if there’s an issue with so many people taking videos and pictures of their drivers texting, there’s a huge problem.”

Union president Bob Kinnear said TTC drivers are “frustrated by the ‘gotcha’” practices of riders because it creates a wrong impression that most drivers are irresponsible. “These are isolated cases,” Kinnear pointed out.

However, the union leader said it’s “completely justifiable” for patrons to snap pictures of drivers who are texting, as long as they don’t cross the line and try to film drivers hoping to catch them in the act.

Instead of trying to capture a “gotcha” moment, Kinnear advises passengers to talk to the driver, asking him or her to stop texting while driving.

“I’d say, ‘Do you mind not texting while you’re driving from point A to point B?”

Mike Schmitz said he was too stunned to confront the driver he caught texting on the 165 Weston Rd. North bus on Wednesday.

“I was just kind of shocked. I had no idea what to say,” Schmitz said. “After I got off the bus I had a thousand clever things to say. But at the time I didn’t.”

Schmitz said driver was going about 50 km/h with his attention divided between the road and his phone.

“I was like, ‘Is this really happening?’ He didn’t even notice when I took the photo.”

Alexia Schell of Scarborough used her iPhone to snap a photo of a bus driver texting in the Lawrence Ave. and Kennedy Rd. area at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday. Schell was with her 1-year-old son and standing at the front of the moving bus at the time.

“I think he was on a BlackBerry,” she said. “He heard me take the picture, but by the time he turned around the phone was back in my purse. He was full texting, looking up and down. I was so upset but I didn’t want to say anything because I had my son with me.”

Schell said she was “very concerned because if the driver had to make a knee-jerk stop, the passengers would have been falling all over and I had a stroller with me.”

Texting on a cellphone or handheld device while driving has been banned in Ontario since October 2009. Drivers who do it can face fines up to $500.

The photos have surfaced at a time when the TTC remains under fire on customer service. Criticism of the “essential service” has been high ever since a commuter photographed a TTC fare collector sleeping on the job last January, and later, when a passenger took video of a driver’s prolonged late-night coffee break in a doughnut shop, while his bus sat idling.

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Buses have closed-circuit television cameras, but Ross said they cannot be used for disciplinary reasons.

“We have an agreement with the union that they will be used only for police investigations.”

Got a photo of a texting TTC driver? Send it to webmaster@thestar.ca