Enhanced seatbelt enforcement begins Monday

The Breaux Bridge Police Department is participating in “Click It or Ticket,” a national seat belt enforcement campaign.
It starts Monday, May 18, and runs through Sunday, May 31.
“Every day, unbuckled motorists are losing their lives in motor vehicle crashes,” said Breaux Bridge Police Chief Rollie Cantu. “As we approach Memorial Day weekend and the summer vacation season, we want to make sure people are doing the one thing that can save them in a crash, buckling up.”
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly half of the 21,132 passenger vehicle occupants killed in crashes in 2013 were unrestrained. At night from 6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m., that number soared to 59 percent of those killed. That’s why one focus of the Click It or Ticket campaign is nighttime enforcement.
Breaux Bridge Police Department & participating law enforcement agencies will be taking a no-excuses approach to seat belt law enforcement, writing citations day and night.
Locally, six unbelted vehicle occupants died in 2014. Almost twice as many males were killed in crashes as compared to females, with lower belt use rates, too. Of the males killed in crashes in 2013, more than half – 54 percent – were unrestrained. For females killed in crashes, 41 percent were not buckled up.
“If you ask the family members of those unrestrained people who were killed in crashes, they’ll tell you—they wish their loved ones had buckled up,” added Chief Cantu. “The bottom line is that seat belts save lives. If these enforcement crackdowns get people’s attention, and get them to buckle up, then we’ve done our job.”
For more information on the Click It or Ticket mobilization, go to www.nhtsa.gov/ciot.