This bill would make failing to wear seat belts a primary offense, meaning that police officers could stop vehicles and write citations whenever they see the seat belt law being violated. The bill makes the driver responsible for a Class B traffic infraction unless he, and all front seat passengers, are wearing seat belts. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that wearing a seat belt in an automobile accident reduces the risk of serious injury or death by roughly 50 percent. These estimates are based on police-reported restraint use information for each individual occupant fatality, and include potential lives saved in all seating positions. Proponents of increasing the penalty for not using seat belts claim that increasing penalties increases usage, and that increased usage lowers traffic injuries and deaths.
Some states already have primary offense laws.
A survey of seat belt use among the fatally injured suggests that seat belt use in that group was 15 percent higher in states with primary offense enforcement laws. In 1996, states that treated seat belt use as a primary offense reported that seat belts were used 74 percent of the time. States that treated seat belt use as a secondary offense reported usage rates of 61 percent. Unfortunately, data like these fail to show that making seat belt usage a primary offense decreases traffic injuries and fatalities. In fact, no jurisdiction that has passed a seat belt law has shown evidence of a reduction in road accident deaths .