Washington State Patrol marked more than 10 years of making seatbelt violations a priority with a press release on its continued “Click It Or Ticket” efforts. As social media technology has developed, those efforts have grown to include using Twitter as a sort of scarlet letter campaign against belt-less driving, seen below. The Twitpic of a car crash in WSP’s last tweet is truly cringe-inducing if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, but the victims of the crash aren’t shown.

The original release:

It has been over ten years since driving/riding in a vehicle without wearing a seatbelt became a primary traffic offense in Washington State. In that time period, seatbelt compliance in our state has risen to over 97 percent. We have been able to reach that number by enforcement programs like “Click it or Ticket”, public information, education, and a lot of hard work by the men and women in law enforcement. With that being said, law enforcement across our state still sees to many preventable, non-belted fatality collisions, which is why we are not letting up on when it comes to seatbelt enforcement.

Year to date, troopers in District 1 (Thurston and Pierce Counties) have stopped over 8,900 drivers for not wearing a seatbelt and have issued over 7,800 tickets. The reason for this is that seatbelts save lives! We are going to continue working hard to ensure seatbelt compliance both day and night is as high as possible. If you get stopped for not wearing a seatbelt, you will likely receive a traffic infraction for $124.00.