SAFE Campaign encourages seat belt safety

JACKSON, Tenn. — Seat belts are for everyone. That’s what authorities said they’re emphasizing over the next six months across the Volunteer State.

“This is a program that we hope that we can educate the motoring public in, but at the same time we are going to be doing enforcement action, and this goes from Feb. 1 to Aug. 1,” Sgt. Joseph Gill of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said.

In that time span, participating agencies plan and implement heightened seat belt enforcement in their communities.

“Seat belts do save your lives, especially if there’s a rollover,” Gibson County Police Chief Bobby Sellers said. “Your vehicle rolls over, it keeps you from being ejected.”

Authorities said 50 percent of people who died in car wrecks in 2014 weren’t wearing their seat belt.

That means just reminding people they need to wear their safety device is going to help save lives.

“Out of 946 crashes, if half of those people were wearing their seat belts, that’d be amazing,” Sgt. Gill said. “If we got that number down to 500, but once we got down to 500, we got to get it down to zero.”

Last year in the “SAFE” campaign, officials say 33,879 seat belt citations were handed out in Tennessee with nearly 2,470 child restraint violations.

Authorities said that number going down shows an investment in our future.

“About 80 to 85 percent of our population now is wearing their seat belts, and even if adults are forced to wear their seat belts, the children see their parents and grandparents wearing the seat belts and it teaches them at an early age that it’s important,” Chief Sellers said.

Authorities said the chances of being injured in a car wreck go up 400 percent if you aren’t wearing a seat belt.

The SAFE campaign begins next Monday, Feb. 1.