Drivers, beware. For the rest of the week, Florida, Georgia, and three other Southern states will be pulling over motorists for speeding as part of the second annual “Operation Southern Shield.”
There’s a rising number of speed-related fatalities in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina as well as Florida and Georgia.
“Most of the states noted that while we do a lot of messaging, to try to prevent distracted driving and getting people to buckle their seatbelts, we don’t do a lot of speed messaging or speed prevention when speeding is one of the top causes of fatal crashes,” said Robert Hydrick, spokesman for the Georgia Governor’s office of Highway Safety.
Hydrick says data shows there were considerably fewer traffic deaths during last year’s speed enforcement campaign than any other week that month.
“As we saw last year in Georgia, you will save lives because on a week-by-week comparison, traffic deaths in Georgia during the week of Southern Shield last year were 35 percent lower than the other three full weeks in July and that is attributed to the enforcement effort that is going on,” he added.
While a warning may be issued in some cases, highway safety officials say they will mostly be giving out citations to those going over the speed limit.
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