Click It or Ticket Campaign Starts May 22
Berkeley, CA—As summer kicks off and families hit the road for vacations, the Berkeley Police Department and the California Office of Traffic Safety is reminding motorists to Click It or Ticket. “Using your seatbelt, and making sure your kids are buckled in, has to be a priority for all of us, all of the time. It’s simple: buckling up should be the automatic next step every time you get into your car,” said Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood.” “As the Memorial Day weekend approaches and the summer vacation season ramps up, 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.”
Aimed at enforcing seat belt use to help keep you and your family safe, the national Click It or Ticket seat belt campaign will take place May 22 through June 4, concurrent with one of the busiest travel and holiday weekends of the year.
Berkeley Police officers will conduct several seat belt enforcement operations during the two week Click It Or Ticket mobilization, as a way to focus on community safety, and to do our part to help lower California’s traffic deaths. In addition to these special patrols, officers on routine patrol will also be looking for unrestrained drivers and passengers to stop and cite.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), nearly half of the 22,441 passenger vehicle occupants killed in crashes in 2015 were unrestrained. During nighttime hours, that number soared to 57 percent of those killed. That’s why one focus of the Click It or Ticket campaign is nighttime enforcement. Participating law enforcement agencies will be taking a no-excuses approach to seat belt law enforcement, writing citations day and night. In Berkeley, the ticket cost for an adult seat belt violation is $162, with penalties for not restraining a child at $465.
In 2015, 545 Californians were killed because they did not buckle their seat belts according to NHTSA. Nationally, almost twice as many males were killed in crashes as compared to females. Of the males killed in crashes in 2015, more than half (52%) were unrestrained, while 42% of females killed in crashes were not buckled up.
“We are asking the community to help spread this life-saving message before one more friend or family member is killed or seriously injured in a collision as a result of not wearing a seatbelt,” said Chief Andrew Greenwood. “Seat belts save lives, and everyone needs to remember to buckle up themselves, and their kids, every trip, every time.”
Funding for these operations is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
For more information on the Click It or Ticket mobilization, please visit www.nhtsa.gov/ciot
Address/Location
Berkeley Police Department
2100 Martin Luther King Jr Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
Contact
Emergency: 9-1-1
Non-emergencies: 510-981-5900