Seat belts click in Kansas as police monitor teen drivers

For teenage drivers, it’s seat belt citation season.

And, on a recent afternoon, it seemed clear that word had gotten around.

“It looks like they’ve all buckled up,” Prairie Village police Detective Adam Taylor said as he scanned students pulling out of the Shawnee Mission East High School parking lot.

That was refreshing news for Taylor and his colleagues, who know all too well how often bad things happen to young drivers, especially unbuckled ones.

Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers.

And teenage drivers have the lowest seat belt use rate of any age group, studies show.

To address that, annual seat belt enforcement efforts targeting teen drivers recently began in Kansas and will launch soon in Missouri.

In 2012, 43 Kansas teenagers and 64 Missouri teenagers died in vehicle crashes.

In Kansas, 74 percent had neglected to buckle up. In Missouri, 80 percent were unbuckled.

Changing such stubborn behavior is made more challenging by the complex maturation issues that teenagers deal with, according to a 2014 Governors Highway Safety Association report.

Local students agree.

“As teenagers we often get into the mindset that we are somewhat invincible,” said Noah Marsh, a Shawnee Mission East senior.

Teenagers offer various reasons for not buckling up, the study found. The seat belts are uncomfortable, they said. Or they didn’t think they needed them on short trips. Or they just forgot to use them.

But there are no good excuses for not buckling up, said Spencer Frank, another Shawnee Mission East senior.

“It’s such a valuable, little two-second thing to do,” he said.

The Seatbelts Are for Everyone program in Kansas, which began in 2008, and a Missouri campaign known as Battle of the Belt place a premium on encouraging peer-to-peer discussions about the issue.

Maggie McGannon, a Shawnee Mission East senior, noted how the police presence outside the school parking lot had prompted animated conversation.

“That’s exactly, I think, what this program is supposed to do,” she said.

The beltless driving habit is not exclusive to younger drivers. About 20 percent of all drivers in Kansas and Missouri do not buckle up, according to a 2014 federal traffic study. Rates in both states are worse than the national average.

That’s one reason Annie Savage, a Shawnee Mission East senior, considers the SAFE program and its two-week enforcement period a net positive.

“We’re fortunate to have this program younger in life,” she said. “It’s a generational thing. I know my parents and grandparents will sometimes forget to buckle their seat belts, because it always wasn’t enforced for them.”

Kansas traffic officials believe their efforts are gaining traction. In 2009, only 61 percent of Kansas teens age 13 through 17 wore seat belts. By 2013, the that had risen to 80 percent.

In March 2008, four Ulysses, Kan., high school students died in a highway collision with a truck in Grant County in southwest Kansas.

None of the sophomores wore a seat belt.

Not long after that crash, a state highway official armed with alarming seat belt statistics dropped by the Crawford County sheriff’s office, in southeast Kansas.

Sheriff Sandy Horton remembers David Corp from the Kansas Department of Transportation telling him: “You’ve got a 53 percent (overall) seat belt compliance rate, the lowest in the state, and what are you going to do about it?”

The number shocked Horton.

“We were seeing a lot of accidents; rollovers and fatalities,” he said. “We have a lot of roads, quite frankly, that were designed many years ago, with very thin and unforgiving shoulders.”

Horton and Corp enlisted students from the county’s six high schools in a new program that featured positive reinforcement. Students could sign seat belt pledge cards. Participants got the chance, at monthly assemblies, to win $25 gift cards.

Officials also told students there would be an enforcement component.

“You could hear them start grumbling, ‘Boo!’” Horton said. “But I said, ‘We’re law enforcement officers, this is the law and we are going to enforce it.’”

The year before the program existed, officers wrote 292 seat belt violation citations to Crawford County teenagers.

The first year of SAFE, they wrote 64. During the next three years, the numbers declined to 25 to 10 to one.

During Horton’s last full year as sheriff in 2012, there were 33 vehicle occupants younger than 21 involved in county rollover accidents. Of those, only three had not been wearing seat belts.

There have been no traffic fatalities among Crawford County teenagers since the SAFE program began, Horton said.

“A lot of sheriffs offices didn’t look at traffic enforcement as a primary obligation — they were working criminal cases and other things,” Horton said.

“But that was a mistake. Traffic enforcement should always have been on the front burner.”

Since its launch in Crawford County, the SAFE program has expanded to 61 counties.

The fine for teenagers violating the law: $60. (The adult fine: $10.)

In 2014, Kansas officers issued more than 2,000 citations to the state’s teenagers during that year’s two-week seat belt enforcement period.

But some mornings this past week, some officers wrote none.

Overland Park police officers stationed outside Blue Valley Academy one recent morning noted that all students reporting to school were wearing their seat belts, said officer Roger Griffith.

“We can’t be disappointed in that,” he said.

This story was originally published March 5, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Seat belts click in Kansas as police monitor teen drivers."