Chicago PD Not Buckled Up

By Margaret Lyons in News on Oct 13, 2004 5:19PM

Some Chicago police officers aren't wearing their seat belts in their squad cars. That's bad enough, but some are going so far as to cut the insert portions out of the back-seat seatbelts and click them into the buckle portions of the front-seat seatbelts so the warning beep doesn't go off. Holy jeeze, get a hobby.

Police seatbelt use has been under investigation since August, when a drunk driver crashed into Officer Michael Gordon's squad car. Gordon wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and he was thrown from his vehicle and died. Some officers claim that they need to be able to jump out of their cars quickly and easily, and that a seat belt can slow them down. The official stance of the CPD is that officers have to wear the belts anyway.

"It is not worth the two to three seconds they might save, given the damage that can be done to people when they are ejected from the car," [David Bayless, a police spokesman] said. "Also, because they are enforcing the state seat belt law, they need to wear them to set an example."

An audit of 3,110 police cars found that seat belts in 137 of them had been tampered with. Those belts will cost about $100 each to fix. We're pretty bad about most healthy habits, but for some reason Chicagoist is really harsh about seat belt safety. Click it or ticket. Buckle up for safety. Buckle up, it's the law. All those catchy slogans really hit us. Also, we like this side-by side comparison because yes, we're self-reliant, and yes, we think you're childish for not wearing a seat belt.