10/3/11 – The Dodge County Sheriff’s Department has received a $25,000 grant to increase seatbelt enforcement. The funds from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Safety will be used to pay for deputy overtime and to purchase new equipment for improved enforcement. Patrol Captain Molly Soblewski says “all too often when responding to a crash, deputies find people killed or seriously injured because they were not buckled up.” She says the goal of this enforcement effort is not to write more tickets but to convince people to buckle up voluntarily. But if voluntary compliance fails, Soblewski says they will issue citations accordingly. According to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, there were nearly 120,000 convictions last year for failure to fasten safety belts, which was an all-time high. Among all traffic violations, safety belt convictions in Wisconsin were second only to speeding convictions.
