Law enforcement officers across Minnesota issued 6,450 hands-free cell phone citations during a month-long distracted driving enforcement campaign.<\/p>\n
The number of tickets handed out in the April campaign was 1,000 more than last year\u2019s initiative.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not out to write tickets \u2013 we’re out to save lives,\u201d said Mike Hanson, director of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety\u2019s Office of Traffic Safety (OTS).<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if drivers won\u2019t take safety seriously, enforcement becomes necessary,\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time you take your eyes off the road, you\u2019re gambling with your life and the lives of others around you. No text, no call is worth a tragedy. Just put the phone down \u2014 nothing is more important than getting home safely.\u201d<\/p>\n
OTS coordinated the statewide campaign with funding from the National Highway Traffic Safety.<\/p>\n
The St. Paul Police Department issued the most citations, with 1,326. Across the state, law enforcement used a variety of visible and proactive methods to identify distracted drivers. In South Lake Minnetonka, officers use a new camera system to give law enforcement a bird\u2019s eye view of the road, while Dakota County law enforcement got up in cherry pickers to see in cars and identify drivers on their phones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Law enforcement officers across Minnesota issued 6,450 hands-free cell phone citations during a month-long distracted driving enforcement campaign. The number of tickets handed out in the April campaign was 1,000 more than last year\u2019s initiative. \u201cWe are not out to write tickets \u2013 we’re out to save lives,\u201d said Mike Hanson, director of the Minnesota […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":15159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}