'What's Holding You Back' from buckling seat belts?

Beginning today and continuing through June 4, law enforcement agencies throughout the Mahoning Valley, Ohio and the nation will be on the lookout for drivers wearing or not wearing seat belts as part of the "What's Holding You Back, Click It or Ticket" campaign.
The campaign is part of a $31 million nationwide drive using checkpoints, increased patrols, advertisements and public awareness programs to help enforce seat-belt laws. The program is worth every penny of grant funding spent on it if it succeeds in increasing belt use -- if only minimally -- and thereby decreasing the number of injuries and deaths from vehicle accidents.
According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, seat-belt use in Ohio stands at 79 percent. The goal of the "What's Holding You Back" campaignis to increase that rate to 86 percent.
Profiling drivers?
Despite gains in seat belt use, 48 million Americans still fail to buckle up, according to a recent report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The report found the last of the unbuckled to be largely young men in rural areas who drive pickup trucks.
That's why Ohio's campaigns are particularly targeting rural areas, young male drivers and pickup trucks. Some may call that discriminatory profiling; we call it a realistic enforcement strategy to reach the last major group of seat-belt wearing holdouts.
Evidence from studies by the NHTSA underscore the importance of targeting those groups. The agency's most recent study found:
U 58 percent of those killed who were not wearing a seat belt crashed along rural roads.
U In crashes involving pickup trucks, about seven in 10 people who died were unbelted.
U Among men 21-24, about two-thirds of those killed in vehicles were not wearing a seat belt.
Nature of local efforts
The Mahoning Valley campaign was set to kick off at 11 a.m. today with a public awareness program at the Chevrolet Centre in downtown Youngstown. The program, sponsored by Mahoning Safe Communities and the Operating Vehicles Intoxicated Task Force, will feature police representatives from departments throughout Mahoning and Trumbull counties, a crashed car, crash-test dummies and many speakers. The campaign will also include advertisements, billboards, yard signs, checkpoints and heightened seat-belt enforcement.
Despite these worthwhile efforts, however, seat- belt enforcement in Ohio can go only so far. The Buckeye State remains one of 24 in the nation that has failed to adopt primary seat-belt laws. Those laws allow police to stop motorists solely for failing to wear seat belts. As a secondary enforcement state, Ohio agencies can ticket motorists for failure to wear seat belts only if they are stopped for another violation.
Data from the NHTSA demonstrate that seat-belt use is higher and deaths and injuries lower in primary states. Safe Communities leaders in the Valley are continuing to meet with state legislators to craft legislation to make Ohio a primary enforcement state in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, the "What's Holding You Back" campaign is a worthwhile and productive event. Locally, law enforcement agencies will be rewarding belted drivers over the next two weeks with vouchers for tickets to Youngstown State University football and Mahoning Valley Scrappers games.
While the intent of the rewards program is noble, buckling up is a winning proposition in and of itself. Simply put, wearing seat belts saves lives.