Florida police will be looking for speeders this week, including Bradenton and Sarasota
The Bradenton and Sarasota Police Departments are gearing up to participate in a week-long multi-state campaign to reduce speeding and save lives on the road during the busy summer travel season.
Operation Southern Slow Down, which will take place July 17-23, is a high visibility enforcement and awareness campaign to reduce the number of fatal and severe injury crashes during a time of year when the roads are packed.
The operation will see both departments partner with law enforcement agencies across Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.
“The most important thing about driving is staying safe behind the wheel,” Officer Tim Bales, with the Sarasota Police Department, said in a news release. “One of our primary goals in our Traffic Unit is to make sure residents in our community and those visitors who are traveling through get home safely.”
For more than two decades, speeding has been involved in approximately one-third of all motor vehicle fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2021, speeding was a contributing factor in 29% of all traffic fatalities.
In 2022 in the city of Bradenton, the police department officers issued 775 criminal traffic citations for offenses including driving under the influence and driving while license suspended.
Officers also wrote 2,057 non-criminal moving citations for infractions such as speeding and careless driving, in addition to nearly 450 tickets for non-moving violations, such as failure to wear a seat belt.
During that same time span, the City of Sarasota saw police officers issue 267 citations and warnings for not wearing a seat belt, 5,243 for speeding and 1,000 citations and warnings for driving while license suspended. There were also 168 arrests for driving under the influence, a news release said.
Operation Southern Slow Down, which was formerly Operation Southern Shield, was launched in 2017 and is a joint effort with the National Highway Traffic Administration.
