Officials enforce seat belt use
Local law enforcement agencies across Franklin County joined with others in the state on Monday to officially kick off the “Click It or Ticket” campaign.
The national campaign, which is an effort to get motorists to be more conscious of wearing their seatbelts, will last through June 3.
Officials with the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) hope the campaign will keep Alabama’s roadways safer over the Memorial Day weekend.
To help with overtime costs and extra patrol officers who will be checking for seatbelt violations, ADECA awarded a total of $250,000 in grant money to the nine regional highway safety offices in the state.
The North Alabama Highway Safety Office, which serves Colbert, Cullman, Franklin, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Marion, Morgan and Winston counties, received $25,250 that will help local agencies enforce the campaign without taking money away from already strapped municipal funds.
Red Bay Police Chief Janna Jackson said her department will be participating in the campaign because she has seen first-hand the importance of seatbelt use in her 16 years in law enforcement.
“We are making this campaign a priority because it has been proven that the more traffic enforcement you have, the less automobile accidents there are,” Jackson said. “The ‘Click It or Ticket’ campaign may seem like a pain to some people, but it’s for the safety of all our motorists that they get in the habit of wearing their seatbelts when they drive.”
According to ADECA, since the first Alabama “Click It or Ticket” campaign in 2001, seatbelt usage has gone from 79 percent to 88 percent among Alabama drivers as of 2011.
“Wearing your seatbelt may seem like a trivial thing to do, but you never know what’s going to happen to you when you get behind the wheel of your car,” Jackson said. “I have seen so many traffic fatalities that could have been prevented if the person had just been wearing his or her seatbelt.”
According to ADECA’s Law Enforcement and Traffic Safety Division (LETS), more than half of the passenger vehicle occupants killed in traffic crashes in 2008 were unrestrained at the time of the crash.
LETS facts also show that in 2008, 54 percent of passenger vehicle occupant fatalities occurred in vehicles that sustained frontal damage, and being ejected from the vehicle accounted for 27 percent of all passenger vehicle occupant fatalities.
“The numbers are there in black and white that your chances for being seriously or fatally injured in a traffic accident are significantly higher if you aren’t wearing your seatbelt,” Franklin County Sheriff Shannon Oliver said. “We will be doing all we can to make sure motorists understand that wearing your seatbelt isn’t just something you should do during this campaign – it’s something you should do all the time to make sure you stay safe.”
