Several law enforcement agencies held an event earlier this month in Guthrie County.

District 4 Iowa State Patrol Resource Officer Shelby McCreedy tells Raccoon Valley Radio, in partnership with the Guthrie County Sheriff’s Office, Panora Police Department and the Guthrie County Attorney’s Office, they conducted a traffic safety education event at Guthrie Center and Panorama high schools. McCreedy says law enforcement conducted traffic stops 40 minutes before the start of school. She points out, they were looking for seat belt and cell phone usage, as well as speeding.

McCreedy says then during the school day, they had all of the high school students in an assembly for 30 minutes to educate the young drivers of preventable bad driving habits. She recalls the message they gave to the students.

“We’re trying to modify behavior, we’re trying to really instill in you that the choices you make on a daily basis can be incredibly impactful to the point of life and death. So we’re trying to intervene now before the community has to learn the lesson the hard way.”  

McCreedy believes this event is a proactive approach to law enforcement.

“We put our heads together and really came up with this multi-agency project that was geared more towards identifying the dangerous driving behaviors, addressing them with the students, and then educating the students about the changes that they need to make.”

McCreedy says only warnings were issued to the 18 traffic violations that were found. To hear more from McCreedy, listen to tomorrow and Wednesday’s Let’s Talk Guthrie County program.