Wyoming Law Enforcement are reminding motorists to Click It or Ticket. As part of the national seat belt enforcement campaign, law enforcement agencies around the country will be stepping up enforcement May 18th through the 31st , just ahead of one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.

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. 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%) were unrestrained. For females killed in crashes, 41 percent were not buckled up.

In 2014 there were 5 fatal crashes and 8 fatalities on Wyoming Highway 59 between Douglas and Gillette. Participating Converse and Campbell County Law Enforcement and the Wyoming Highway Patrol will be taking a no-excuses approach to seat belt law enforcement, writing citations day and night.

WYDOT Law Enforcement Liaison Pete Abrams said,

“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, 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.”

Over Memorial Day Weekend 2014, there were no crash fatalities in Wyoming. Let’s all work together to do this again in 2015.

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