Chesterfield, MO police implement seat belt checks at local schools

Chesterfield Police implement seat belt checks at local schools

According to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), approximately 573 children ages 14 and younger are injured or killed in motor vehicle crashes each day. The Chesterfield Police Department is focused on reducing that number.

Chesterfield Police Patrolman Paul Powers, the department's traffic safety officer, is implementing a program aimed at getting elementary and middle school students to buckle up whenever they are in a car. The program is an adaptation of a program that the Chesterfield Police Department started at Parkway Central and Parkway West High Schools to get high schoolers to consider buckling up for prom.

"When school is let out, we go up there and stand at the exits of the school and we stop the cars as they're leaving," Power said. "We check to make sure that everyone is in their seat belts or in their car seats. If the kids are, then we give them a sucker."

If the officers find passengers not buckled up, they do not hand out tickets, but they do talk to the passengers as well as the driver about the benefits of wearing a seat belt.

"If they're not, then we talk to them and we tell them why they should be buckled up and the benefits of using their seat belts," Powers said. "If the parents are not buckled up, then we talk to the parents about when their kids get older they're watching you right now, so they need to wear their seat belt, too."

Despite being just a couple of months old, the program with the elementary and middle schools has been a huge success, Powers said.

"On average, we're giving out suckers about 95 percent of the time," Powers said. "There's only about 5 percent of the time where we're talking to the kids and telling them about wearing their seat belts and stuff like that. In the high schools, we're probably at about 75 percent seat belt usage."

Powers said that is above the state's average.

"Right now Missouri is at about 67 percent for high school students and we've been concentrating on the high schools for so long trying to get that number up," Powers said. "When we got to talking about it this year, we thought that if we can get the younger kids to wear it and to know that they're to be wearing it at all times, maybe when they get to high school, we can increase that number because it's become a habit for them."