Arkansas-side police remind motorists to wear seat belts

As summer kicks off and families hit the road for vacations, the Texarkana, Ark., Police Department is reminding motorists to Click It or Ticket.

Aimed at enforcing seat belt use to help keep drivers and their family safe, the national seat belt campaign will take place May 22 through June 4, concurrent with one of the busiest travel and holiday weekends of the year.

“Our law enforcement personnel see firsthand the loss of life when people refuse to buckle up,” said TAPD Sgt. Les Hunter. “It’s such a simple thing, and it should be an automatic next step after sitting down in a vehicle. We want to keep our community members safe, and make sure people are doing the one thing that can save them in a crash: buckling up. If the enforcement crackdown wakes people up to the dangers of unrestrained driving and gets them to buckle up, we’ll consider it a success,” Hunter said.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly half of the 22,441 passenger vehicle occupants killed in crashes in 2015 were unrestrained. At night, from 6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m., that number soared to 57 percent of those killed. That’s why one focus of the Click It or Ticket campaign is nighttime enforcement.

Also, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 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 2015, more than half (52 percent) were unrestrained. For females killed in crashes, 42 percent were not buckled up.

Officers with the TAPD will be out patrol the area for violators not wearing their seat belts during this time and will stop those who are not following the Arkansas State law.

For more information on the Click It or Ticket mobilization, please visit www.nhtsa.gov/ciot.